Crooked Family Tree

1930 Federal Census

I had some extra time on my hands in April of 2002, having just been layed off from a soon-to-be-bankrupt-dot-com.  Fortunately the National Archives had just released the 1930 Census.  Even more fortunate was that one of a dozen or so NARA annexes was down the street in Laguna Niguel.  Man, I got hooked.  And fast.

The main lines of my family tree have a short history in America.  Most immigrated here from Ireland or Germany between 1890 and 1930.  After spending a few days in the archive, I quickly ran out of microfilms with data.

“What do I do know?”
“A lot of people go to a Family History Center.  Many Mormon churches have one.  The Orange FHC is pretty big.”

Yep.  It is.  Actually, it’s huge compared to most other centers.  Each Family History Center has a local catalog of available books, microfilms and other resources.  All of this is free to patrons.  What they don’t have, they are able to borrow from the ginormous Family History Library in Salt Lake City.  The patron pays for shipping, and a week later you get to look at your film.

Oops.  I was out of work.  Spending duckage to order genealogy films probably wasn’t a good idea.  So I did the next best thing.  I traded the FHC some used computer equipment in exchange for film credits.  They were happy to get some 17″ computer monitors.  I was happy to get rid of them.  I was even happier to look at Irish Birth Registers and New York Passenger lists.

http://www.orangefhc.info/
http://www.archives.gov/pacific/laguna/