Census records have long been hailed as one of the great repositories of information for family historians, featuring the names and other details of many people who lived in certain areas at certain times. If you're tracing your family history, the information included in census reports could be invaluable to your search - and the good news is, many of these documents are now available to access online.
Searching through census records used to be a difficult and demanding exercise, which involved travelling to a repository and manually searching through hefty volumes to find the names you're looking for. The process could be made even more difficult due to the census being preserved on microfilm, which would require much tedious scanning through filmed records to find further details and sometimes taking several days.
Fortunately for family researchers, census records are among the public documents chosen to be digitised and archived online by many governments, meaning it's now easier than ever to access certain records and even print the original pages from census reports, sometimes stretching back hundreds of years to the 17th century and earlier. The ability to search these records using keywords also eliminates the time-consuming task of browsing manually, and means historians are now freer to find indirect relatives in addition to direct ancestors, whereas before the process could be too time-consuming to make this worthwhile.
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