The federal population census began in 1790 and was taken every ten years. They are closed for 72 years because of privacy laws, so the most current one available is 1930. The 1940 census will be available in 2012. There was fire in 1921 which destroyed most of the 1890 census so very little of that one exists. The early federal census had very little information collected compared to the later ones. For detailed information about what each federal census included, see this document, page 3: Fact Finder for the Nation, Availability of Census Records About Individuals which is published by the U.S. Census Bureau. Many states did a census in between the federal decade years, such as Minnesota did them in 1857 (territory census), 1865, 1875, 1885, 1895, 1905. There are also industry and agriculture, mortality, and veterans schedules available for various years. They can be helpful also.
All of the state and federal census extractions are available on microfilm which can be viewed at libraries, various archives and some of the MNGenWeb project pages may have compiled extractions. The best place to do on site research for Minnesota is at the Minnesota History Center Library. There are also a number of online resources but most require a subscription, except the 1880 census is available for free on the LDS familysearch Web. They don’t give you a view of the actual extraction, but they do give the source information when you have a ‘hit.’ You can then view the source document.
Depending on who furnished the information when the census taker came calling will depend on how accurate it is. If your ancestor wasn’t home and the information was provided by the neighbor, it could be way off. But if you don’t know where great-great-grandma was born, depending on the year of the census, you could have another clue to follow. The census schedules can provide you with many clues and is probably one of the most commonly used resources available. I have every possible census extraction for all my ancestors.
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