Source Information

Ancestry.com. U.S., Census Reconstructed Records, 1660-1820 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.
Original data: Census Publishing. State Census Records. West Jordan, Utah: Census Publishing, 2003-2009.

About U.S., Census Reconstructed Records, 1660-1820

Census Publishing’s staff started an enormous fill-in-the blanks project in 2003 when they began reconstructing missing decennial censuses for the early United States. Records in this database come from their efforts to both restore or re-create missing pieces of early censuses and actually create decennial “census” records for the years prior to 1790.

Census Publishing describes its method as a “two-phase approach”:

  • Information will be combined from many sources including, but not limited to: tax lists, legislative petitions, voter's lists, state and federal land records, military lists, etc., in order to construct the basic foundation of a list of potential heads of households.
  • Once the foundation is laid, the structure (members of the family, ages, birthplaces, etc.) will be built using records familiar to every genealogist such as probate, land, military, vital, and published histories and genealogies.

This database contains reconstructions for the following states (though the reconstruction is not necessarily complete for any entire state):

  • Alabama
  • Arkansas
  • Delaware
  • Georgia
  • Illinois
  • Indiana
  • Kentucky
  • Louisiana
  • Michigan
  • Mississippi
  • Missouri
  • New Jersey
  • New York
  • North Carolina
  • Ohio
  • Pennsylvania
  • South Carolina
  • Tennessee
  • Virginia

Entries may include name, residence, age, gender, color/race, occupation, birthplace, whether a slave, and source information.