Three Days of Free Access to Mind-Boggling Database

Did Your Ancestors Come West?

By Jill Kuraitis, 6-22-06

Five billion searchable names – that’s billion, as in “gabillion” – are now online, thanks to Salt Lake City’s Ancestry.com. For three days, you can search the whole magilla without paying a cent. After that, it’s $155 a year.

It’s a huge opportunity, especially since Ancestry just finished adding complete census records from 1790 to 1930, and it’s the only place you can search those records in detail online. Mercy! Think of it – from 1790. That’s just after the Revolutionary War.

Ancestry says it took workers a combined 6.6 million hours of labor to pull off this staggering feat. They had to scan images of census documents, figure out the handwriting, then catalog each record – by hand. On a keyboard. 540 million names. Oy.

I bow in gratitude and awe at the workers who pulled this off.

You can find fascinating information, not just birth and death dates. Some records chronicle people’s moves across America, race, marital status, financial records, education level and other information.

If you’ve lived in the West all your life, you can find out how you got here. Did your folks’ folks’ folks come from the East? Perhaps they followed the Oregon Trail. What was the reason they migrated? Sometimes, you can puzzle it out from the available information. Maybe they were fur traders, miners, ranchers, preachers, or something exciting like gamblers, outlaws or horse racing folk. No such luck for me – mine were ordinary eastern-European peasants who came to the New World for that classic reason – to find a better life for their children (in a place where Cossacks wouldn’t keep violently galloping around, trashing towns, farms, and human lives).

I found my maternal grandmother Juliana Chipp (shortened from Cebatorius) was married to my grandfather about five years earlier than I’d thought. Grandmother was born in Lithuania, but apparently Grandpa was not, even though he, too, was Lithuanian. My family had always assumed he was straight off the boat.

On my father’s side, I found a real surprise - an uncle who fought in the Civil War.

Ancestry.com has more than 700,000 paid subscribers. For three free days, you can pretend to be one of them. It’s a beautiful website, and great fun.

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