Downloading indexed US Census data and images?

December 21, 2016 10:58 AM

Is there an easy way to download or scrape the complete U.S. census images and index data for a particular town from familysearch.org? I'd like to analyze data for a smallish town, but not so much that I would like to transcribe a few thousand records manually.
posted by entropicamericana to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

As one possible starting point, you used to be able to get text files of a good many volunteer record transcriptions. I did some very basic processing (of the grab-text-files-and-write-bad-Perl variety) on some of them a few years back. I'm sure similar techniques could still be used easily enough.

Looks like the text files are still indexed here.
posted by brennen at 11:22 AM on December 21, 2016

Response by poster: Unfortunately, the town I'm interested in is not transcribed on that site.
posted by entropicamericana at 1:36 PM on December 21, 2016

The National Archives says "Check with the USGenWeb project to see if census records from your states of interest have been transcribed (free of charge). See both http://www.us-census.org/ and http://www.rootsweb.com/~census/states.htm".
posted by snowmentality at 3:51 PM on December 21, 2016

What years are you looking for? We have a lot of data at ipums.org for free download.
posted by advicepig at 7:36 PM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]