I'm Ancestry.com free going on 14 days now and I'm finding the withdrawal symptoms more painful than I expected. My Ancestry.com subscription expired on April 9. I decided I wanted to free up $299 for some other things and didn't renew. I'm not delusional enough to really believe I'm actually going to "save" the money rather than spend it foolishly, but it makes me feel better to say I "saved" $299.
Since I've been without the service for 14 days now, I miss the census collection the most. I never realized how much I relied on this complete collection in my routine research. For example I was re-
reading one of my second great grandfather's Civil War pension file last weekend and came across a couple of names of people who lived near him. So, what do I usually do whenever I come across a name I don't know anything about? I fire up Ancestry and do a quick census search, but as I opened my browser, I realized I couldn't do that anymore. Of all the content on Ancestry, not having quick access to the census collection cramps my style the most and I haven't found a good replacement.
The past couple weekends I tried to use my local public library for Ancestry.com access, but ran into a problem. I've never used the computers at a public library before so this was a new experience for me and it kind of reminded me of driving in the Washington DC area. Outside of their cars people are friendly, caring and happy, but put them behind the wheel and the same people become raving lunatics. I didn't realize what the computer etiquette was at the library: if you had one, you never gave it up and if you didn't you circled like a shark (constantly in motion) and at the slightest movement that someone was standing up you quickly moved in for the kill. Being the polite and considerate person I am, I simply waited. I felt weird just standing there hovering over someone's shoulder so I left to browse the newspaper collection, and when I came back, I noticed those who had a computer were still hunkered down and the sharks were still circling. All I wanted was to look up a couple of stinking names in the census.
The biggest lesson I've learned over the past 14 days is I need a census collection. Footnote is getting there, but they only have the 1860 census, and (as of today) 90% of the 1930 - I need all of them. I did find an interesting site called Census Online (and many others like it), but the links are to transcriptions and I prefer to view the actual image myself. Familysearch.org will eventually get there, but as of right now they don't have the complete collection and a couple of the years have no images.
Since I fear for my life in the weird library ecosystem I observed, anyone know of a place where I can find the complete US census collection with indexed images at no or low cost?
(Since a few people have been wondering why I don't put a photo up, I've included one in this post...I look exactly like this one except I'm not a cartoon, don't have yellow hair and don't have an oval head...I do wear glasses though)
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