I am writing this because not long ago I saw a question posted asking for opinions about the Ancestry.com Census images - are they worth it? I do not remember which list I saw this question posted so I am sending this to the 3 lists I know that have the most subscribers in hopes of offering answer (in my opinion) to the inquiring individual.

First of all, I am not attempting to increase their sales or do I receive any compensation. As a matter of fact, I subscribed to a year of their Census service when it first came out and it was cancelled at the end of 3 months. I complained to them immediately, to no avail. So I terminated my subscription. At that time they only had the 1790 censuses online.

After almost a year of waiting I decided that I would subscribe once again. We do alot of research for BINNS and BAIRD/BEARD surnames and they stretch all over the US. We needed many census pages for our records. Our state library, Library of Michigan, has all the census microfilms. So we have hundreds of copies of the pages we need. Unfortunately the image quality is not the best with most of these images. These include all the census years from 1790 to 1920. Since Ancestry.com now has most of the images online we thought that now would be a good time to evaluate their images.

Simply stated we were shocked at what we saw. The quality of their images is astounding. We have no idea how they get these images but they are definitely not from microfilms. Many of these images show that the pages are in a multi-ring binder. So many of our microfilm images are blackened so baddly that we can not make out what the writing is. In comparison the Ancestry.com images have no blackened areas at all. Everything is completely readable. We have saved almost 100 images so far and have them converted to JPG files, which save a lot of file space. And we look forward to researching all the rest of the images that we still need.

I know this sounds like a great sales plug. But as an ALL SURNAME family researcher who needs the resources of the entire census inventory I have been totally impressed with what I've gotten from the Ancestry.com census images. I only wish that I had available the Virginian Tax Lists in the quality that these censuses images are.

I offer this as my humble opinion........

Steve
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