The first U.S. census enumeration began on Monday, August 2, 1790, just 16 months after the inauguration of President George Washington and less than nine years after the end of the Revolutionary War. As the first official record of the citizenry of this fledgling country, the importance of these records to those researching the colonial period is unsurpassed.

Of the original 13 states plus 4 territories (now Kentucky, Maine, Vermont, and Tennessee) that were included in that first census, only the records of 12 still exist, the remainder having been lost or destroyed. Upon popular demand, the Bureau of the Census published those surviving records in 1907-1908 in a series of twelve volumes, one each for Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia, the latter having been reconstructed from extant 1782-1785 state census lists (tax lists were used for Greenbrier County) for 39 of Virginia's then 74 counties.

This, then, is that entire collection of existing census records from 1790 as published in 1907-1908, encompassing more than 400,000 families, and offered for the first time on a single CD-ROM with full-text search. For each household are itemized the name of the head of the family and the number of persons in each household of the following descriptions: free white males of 16 years and upward (to assess the countries industrial and military potential), free white males under 16 years, free white females, all other free persons (by sex and color), and slaves.

Although the head of each family is extremely important to genealogical researchers, the value of this collection extends much further, inasmuch as it can be used as supporting evidence of the family size as well as the sex and approximate ages of the household members. The records here are arranged geographically (as in the original), which will help to identify not only the location of each family but their neighbors and likely relatives in close proximity. With the word-proximity search, you can even look for two or more names that appear within a specified number of the original records -- effectively isolating those cases where families of interest lived (and perhaps transacted, intermarried or migrated) with each other.

As a bonus, we've included high-resolution digital copies of the original fold-out maps that were published with each of the 12 volumes. Today, intact copies of these maps are extremely rare and are not known to be available in any other electronic form, including subscription web sites.

The user can search the text of any individual state/volume or all twelve volumes at the same time (including AND, OR, phonetic and word proximity searches), making this an indispensable research tool. And at just $29.95 to own your personal copy of these records, you'll never make a better investment in your research.



The CD includes high-quality images of every page as originally published (not just a transcript) and is fully searchable using Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 4 or later recommended) on any Windows, Macintosh, or Unix computer. The data files are completely self-contained, and require no installation.