Getting From FamilySearch's 1840 Census Index to the Image

FamilySearch recently released their 1840 census index. As of this writing, the index is free, but the viewing of images requires an Ancestry.com account.

Never fear, the unindexed images are on www.archive.org and they are not too difficult to find. The person I was looking for was in Jackson Township, Coshocton County, Ohio, in 1840 on page 289 of microfilm roll 387.

At http://www.archive.org, I needed to locate this roll of film. Pretty easy. I searched for "1840 0387" in at www.archive.org (for some reason the roll numbers have an extra leading 0. My search terms and the results are shown in the image below.

The microfilm can be viewed on the computer directly or downloaded as a PDF file if you want the entire roll.

The problem (for some) will be navigating to page 289. The 1840 census is stamped in the upper right corner. It took a little doing, but eventually I got to page 289, and sure enough, there was James.

Not too difficult.
Turns out his brother-in-law was next door, but the census taker didn't ask those kinds of questions.

Questions about searching can be posted as comments and I'll try to answer them as best I can.

You can order my webinar on using Archive.org here.