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A snippet of the 1910 census, showing my father's family

I've been taking advantage of three days of free research from Ancestry.com. This web-based service enables you to construct your family tree. It's free to join and to construct your tree, but to do deeper research you must subscribe.

Luckily, I had enough information on my ancestors that I was able to find a lot of fascinating family data. Most of my hits came from the census records that Ancestry.com has scanned and stored.

I printed records from the 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930 census files.  The handwriting on the older records was spidery and precise. Even so, some of the census takers made mistakes, from recording incorrect middle initials to misspelling names.

I found that my maternal grandfather grew up in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore and that he had nine brothers and sisters. His mother was a widow, and three of his siblings worked in a cotton mill.

What tickled me the most was the 1930 census, because both my mother's family and father's families were listed on the same page. They were next-door neighbors; my mom says she decided that she was going to marry my dad when she was 8 and he was 11. My mom was surprised and pleased when I showed her the image; she confirmed that yes, she had been a stenographer then, and my dad had been an auto mechanic.

Now I'm hooked. I'll be subscribing soon and digging even deeper to find the roots of my family tree.