Family Historian User Group

Jane, if you don't think this kind of news is appropriate for the group, feel free to remove this...

Footnote.com, the website of the US National Archives, is offering free access to the 1930 US Federal Census for the month of August.

This requires signing up for their Basic (free) membership. This is comparable to Ancestry's (free) Registered Membership and should NOT require you giving them a credit card number, or signing up for a free trial which has to be canceled before your free days run out (although Footnote does have such an offer as well, and will tease you if you click on too many images which require the paid membership).

Footnote has a certain amount of material they allow one to access for free -- the non-free material is marked as 'premium' and can be viewed either by subscription or pay-as-you-go.

As far as I can see, you don't have to be in the US to sign up, although one of my UK pen-pals said that she was unable to register.

Even for materials that are marked premium, the free membership gives you access to the index listings, so (unlike Ancestry), for a city directory, when you search for 'George Burns' they will tell you the page with the hit shows:

Burns Arthur
Byron George

Thus you can see at a glance that there is no entry for 'Burns George' which saves a great deal of sorting through pages that aren't relevant to your search.

(For fans of space exploration, there is also an extensive (free) online exhibit of Apollo program photographs, in honor of the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.)

Jan

ID:3917

I joined footnote.com some time ago to get their email updates on my research surname which I occasionally get when an Axtell dies and their entry in the SSDI gets updated. So being the UK is no barrier.

One note about the free access to the 1930 census - you HAVE to access it from the following URL. Any other entry to the census will cause viewing a page to display a prompt to register fully.

http://go.footnote.com/1930census/

Thanks for this information. I am in the UK and was able to register using the link provided by Jon Axtell and did not have to provide a credit card number. I very quickly found the record for my grandmother's brother who had emigrated to the US in 1905.

My husband's g-grandfather came over in 1898 -- or so we thought -- but I soon discovered that many of the people in his family went back and forth several times.

City directories have been very helpful here -- in one case, I found g-grandfather's name followed by 'rem to England'. Plus listings of the type 'Mrs. Jane Smith wid John' have provided many leads.

Ancestry is making a big push now to provide a '1940 US Census Substitute' with many city directories from 1940 +/- 3 years. It's much easier to tackle the census when you have the city directory's street guides and the printed names and addresses of the people you are looking for.

I try to keep an eye out for new collections coming online covering what Ancestry calls 'emigration/immigration' and would be happy to give a heads-up if there are particular things you need.

Jan