By Kimberly Brown, Family Historian

Knowing the "ins and outs" of census research is essential to researching ancestors in the United States. And even though sites like Ancestry have good and self-explanatory search engines for the U.S. federal census, there are still some basic terms you should be familiar with when working with census records. Some of these are:

. enumerator- the person who goes door-to-door taking down census information
. Soundex- a system used to code surnames according to their consonant sounds so that you can search a database to find variations of a surname (Smythe and Smith are coded as the same surname, for instance)
. population schedule- the typical census records that record the names and ages of individuals
. non-population schedule- any census enumeration that was not taken for the purpose of calibrating population (like a mortality schedule, agricultural schedule, or industrial schedule)
. mortality schedule- along with the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 census, enumerators had to take information on all the people who had died during the previous twelve months
. agricultural schedule- these schedules, taken in 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 list the owners of farms and the value of their equipment, livestock, crops, and land
. slave schedule- taken up to 1860, these schedules list only the age and gender of a slave and the name of the slave owner
. enumeration district, or ED- for the purpose of taking the census, towns were divided up into areas known as enumeration districts; one district was assigned to each enumerator
. township- before a city had been officially incorporated as a city, it was part of an unincorporated area known as a township