Hello Gail,

You can possibly speed up your Ancestry Census searches by using "keys" other than exact name.

For example, For any given Census year try entering only State, County & Race .....no name.

This will get you all Blacks, Mulatto, Colored and/or Negro depending upon your race identifier for State "ABC", County "XYZ". You may even add an age range, gender and birth location to shorten your number of hits. The listing of hits is usually in alphabetic order within a State/County/Twonship.

This is not a perfect solution to speeding up your Census searches, but it might help. A side benefit using this technique is you often pick up on the various spellings for given & surnames, combinations that Soundex won't find.

Hope this helps,

Art Thomas