There are two key documents that are available courtesy of the US Census Bureau dating to the nineteenth-century. The first thing that the Bureau did (and still does) was to publish its decennial report, which is a statistical overview of the nation for each census year, arranged by state and territory, with county and community information as appropriate. It can also offer information concluded with the various questions that were asked in each year, but these questions are different for each year. The census reports are available in designated repositories for federal records. This usually includes the state library of each state and the government publication libraries of key universities. Much of this material is also available online.

In addition, the bureau releases the manuscript census records after more than seven decades - to ensure the privacy of (most of) those who have been recorded. These are handwritten documents using printed sheets made available to census enumerators who asked the questions of people and filled in the answers. It is important to make clear whether one is talking about the published, printed census reports or the handwritten, unpublished manuscript census records.

The manuscript census documents are enormously valuable because they represent the raw census data - and it is possible to seek individuals as well as to ask and answer questions that are not part of the final census reports. Sadly, these records have not normally been transcribed and can only be viewed and used in a few ways.

Key libraries usually have the manuscript records on microfilm, but it is tiresome task to go through them. In addition, key genealogical sites (including Ancestry.com) offer search tools for names - but that is it. And of course there is a charge.

As far as I know, Nevada was the only state to have a comprehensive database using all its manuscript census records from 1860-1920. This allowed for a wide variety of demographic and fertility-oriented research to be conducted. Working with key senators, I was able to I made it possible to have the database available as an online tool for international researchers, but after my retirement in 2012, the site was moved and it has finally been made inaccessible for want of financial support to keep it available.

Thanks to this resource, my books The Roar and the Silence: Virginia City and the Comstock Lode (1998) and Comstock Women: The Making of a Mining Community (1998) were greatly enriched by statistical information. Working with two interns, we were able to "pull" all the laundry workers in the Virginia City National Historic Landmark District to understand where they lived as well as their ethnic origin and marital status, arriving at conclusions about who was doing this work - for an article that appeared in the Western Historical Quarterly (1994). On a much smaller scale, I was able to consider all the immigrants to Nevada from the Isle of Man. There were not many of them, but what would have required years to searching through each page to find the 100+ individuals was accomplished in a matter of seconds. My resulting article, "The Manx in Nevada: Leaving ‘The Dear Little Isle of Man" (2008) is an example of what can be done with this sort of tool.

One of the main reasons that Nevada could have its census records transcribed was that between 1860 and 1920, there were only 315,000 records. States with larger populations face enormous obstacles, and even for Nevada, the cost of the transcription process was well over $100k in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, I wouldn't expect to see fully transcribed, fully searchable databases by state in a long while - if ever.