Press Releases

PROVO, Utah, March 12 /PRNewswire/ -- MyFamily.com, Inc., the leading network for connecting families and generations on the Web, announced today an aggressive plan to publish digitized images of the 1930 U.S. Federal Census online within hours after the microfilm is released from the National Archives. The viewable and printable images will be available to subscribers through Ancestry.com, part of the MyFamily.com, Inc. network of web sites and the leading resource for family history online.

On April 1, the 1930 Federal Population Census will become available to the public. By law, census records are restricted for seventy-two years, but the wait is almost over. Since the census day in 1930 was April 1, that is the day that 2,667 microfilmed rolls of population schedules, including the names and statistics of over 137 million individuals, will be released for public access at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

The 15th census of the United States, the 1930 census was taken just 5 months after the Wall Street crash on October 29, 1929, and will tell us about the preceding decade of the 1920s. Family historians anxious to have this invaluable resource at their fingertips will find a wealth of information, such as the names of all persons living in each home; their relationship to the head of household; if the family owns a radio or a farm; whether the individuals attended school or college; if they can read or write; each person's place of birth; citizenship status; and occupation.

For the first time digitized images of a portion of the census will be available online within hours of the official census release by the National Archives. MyFamily.com will publish additional images online every day and expects to have all images available online within three months.

In order to help family historians more easily locate individuals in this very valuable census, MyFamily.com has also announced an aggressive plan to create and release census indexes. These indexes should be available online by the end of the year.

"Census records are among the most coveted records available for family historians because of the wealth of information they contain," said Andre Brummer, senior vice president of products for MyFamily.com, Inc. "The 1930 census, because of its size and detail, will reveal more about individuals and the country at large than the earlier censuses. These records will be an invaluable source of information for millions of genealogists and historians alike. An immense amount of time and resources will be devoted to this monumental project to ensure the images are quickly made available online."

Ancestry.com currently offers the most complete collection of U.S. federal census images available online, including records from each U.S. census between the years 1790 and 1920. Ancestry.com census subscribers are able to view original census images from the comfort of their own homes -- twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The online collection saves subscribers time and money by allowing them to view and print documents that have traditionally been stored on microfilm or in a limited number of archives and libraries.

About MyFamily.com, Inc.
MyFamily.com Inc. is the leading company connecting families with their histories, origins and one another. As a next generation media company, MyFamily.com is currently the fourth largest online subscription business with over 600,000 paid subscriptions. The company offers both free and premium paid subscription services to it's network of Internet properties, which include: Ancestry.com, the number one source for tracing family history online; RootsWeb.com, the oldest and largest online genealogy community; and MyFamily.com, the foremost provider of private family web sites. The Company also publishes Ancestry Magazine, Genealogical Computing Magazine, over 50 book titles, and databases on CD-ROM.