M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

The Church's Gift to the World: It's Not About Records; It's About People
by Scot & Maurine Proctor

In the largest press conference in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with a simultaneous broadcast to 27 locations in the United States and Canada, President Gordon B. Hinckley announced that the Church is making invaluable indexes of American and Canadian heritage available free to the public at the touch of a button. The 1880 United States Census and the 1881 Canadian Census, searchable databases of more than 55 million people, are now on the Internet, signifying another great leap forward in online family history research.

These indexed censuses, searchable by name, birthdate, or birthplace are available at www.familysearch.org and represent a treasure trove of easily accessible information.

The work, a joint effort of the Church and the University of Minnesota took 17 years and over 11.5 million hours to complete.

The 1880 American census was chosen because it was the first to list the relationship of the head of the household to family members, as well as the birthplace of parents. It also contains marital status, birthplace, gender, race and occupation. It was also the first online census database to include former slaves and the second U.S. census to record African Americans as individuals rather than property. The 1890 census was burned and is unavailable.

Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Seventy, said, “It's a searchable Internet database. People used to search through rolls and rolls of microfilm - like searching for a needle in a haystack. Now, with just a few keystrokes they can search millions of records instantly.”

President Hinckley said the Church was pleased to offer this tremendous resource free of charge to people, adding that “an amazing thing happens when people begin to trace their roots. They discover they are not alone in this world, that they have a heritage, a legacy and a sense of responsibility to carry on where the ancestors left off.”

The chances of today’s Canadians and Americans finding ancestors in the online databases are extraordinary. If a person’s family lived in one of these two nations during the 1880s and was counted in the census, becoming connected to the past is quick and easy.

Elder Henry B. Eyring demonstrated just how easy it was to access information by using Alexander Graham Bell, the father of modern communication, as an example. He walked through the search, noting that just by listing his name, suddenly a wealth of information was available including everyone who lived in his household and his birthplace. With another click of the key, searchers can find out who lived next door, a valuable help since during that time period many families lived close to each other.

These records open up new possibilities for family searches. Elder Christofferson said, “In the past, people lived near their families and felt a connection through geography. In our mobile society, they find it through family. You may change where you come from but you don't change who you come from.”

“I think what is important about these records is that they are democratic, and I mean that in the small "d" sense of democratic. They can include anyone and I like that idea. It's not famous people or infamous people or powerful people - it's just everyday people,” said Constance Potter, an archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration.

Elder Eyring said “this is not about records but about people.”

Genealogist David Rencher, who has spent years researching his family tree, knows what a valuable tool the indexes can be in finding ancestors who were once lost. "You can learn about their lives, who they were and what they did. It’s like taking a trip in a time machine," Rencher said. "I used to think that I was looking for other people, someone from the past. Now I realize that through all of the searching for others, what I found was myself."

The censuses paint a portrait of two nations, capturing Canada as a burgeoning nation in its infancy and America embarking on its second 100 years at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Robert Bothwell, professor of history at the University of Toronto said, "The 1880s are a period in which Canada consolidates itself as a transcontinental political entity and in which a group of scattered and disparate settlements are unified into a single, quite successful political constitutional system."

The census makes legendary figures come alive for today’s Canadians including the nation’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald; Ojibwa Chief Jacob Berens; painter Robert Harris; Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery; poet and entertainer Pauline Johnson; composer Antoine Gerin-Lajoie; soldier and educator Arthur William Currie; Victoria Cross recipient William Hall; suffragist Emily Howard Stow; and the creator of basketball, James Naismith.

From Wild West legends and influential artists to ambitious industrialists and ingenious inventors, many of the personalities listed in the 1880 United States census are representative of the expansion, innovation and development of the nation. Author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), entertainer William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, inventor Thomas Edison, Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, African-American leader Booker T. Washington, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright brothers, composer John Philip Sousa, Little Women author Louisa May Alcott, human rights advocate Frederick Douglass, and businessmen John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and George Westinghouse are just a few of the notable names found in the census.

Columbia University historian Richard Bushman said, "All those people piled together, working their way upward and outward, trying to find a toehold — that’s what history is and the history of one ancestor is a microcosm of the whole country."

In addition to personal family searches, historians will find this record invaluable. Dr. Eric Foner of Columbia University said , It’s a treasure trove, really, of information which historians are going to using for many years to ask new questions about the past and to flush out the information we have about old questions. 1880 is at a critical moment in our history both in terms of the politics and the social history economic history.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and others volunteered to do the indexing for the1880 U.S. Census, which took 17 years, and the 1881 Canadian Census, which took four years. The Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and the Institute of Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa were partners with the Church to help "clean" the data — a process of standardizing names and localities, and organizing the data for easy retrieval. The data also is available on CD.

For those with British roots, a searchable index of the 1881 British Census is also online, bringing the total number of census names available for family history enthusiasts to 85 million.

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