While watching today’s Ancestry.com webinar and seeing Crista Cowan‘s census table, I noodled around on the Google and created a quick version for download. Just enter names, birth and death years and it will calculate the persons age during each census from 1850 to 1940.
Act now and it will also gray out cells for censuses in which the person was not around!
Below is a static version – apparently you can embed Google spreadsheets, but they aren’t editable. Visit this link to use a live version of it.
Updates:
December 16, 2014: I tried the cell protection in Google Sheets again after having trouble getting it working in previous years. Looks like it does work now – with lots of opening and closing of the sheet after making every sharing change, named range creation, and range protection change. I also had to sacrifice a chicken. So, only the GREEN cells are now editable in the sheet.
I found someone had mistakenly overwritten the formula in at least one cell with a number, which I’ve fixed. This new cell protection should avoid that problem in the future.
November 15, 2016: I’ve added columns to show ages up to the present day even if you start at 1790. I have also added a “Census Year Increment” field. Normally this would remain as a 10, and all the years in the column headers would increment by that amount. But, say you wanted to also have the ages handy for years ending in “5” to help you look for peoples in the NY State censuses: Now you can just change the Increment field to a 5 and Voila! Mathematics is your friend!
One thing to note: Google Sheets seems to show protected cells by default with a cross-hatch background that makes it hard to read the cell info. You can click on the View menu at the top of the sheet, then de-select the Protected Cells option to get rid of that cross-hatch. (The non-green cells will still be protected, of course.)
(Don’t worry, I’ve got copies in case the sheet gets borked. And hey you – YES YOU, we all know you don’t have any Walter Melons in you tree so no funny names, Mister Smartypants.)
You can also download a copy to use in your own Excel or Open Office software by clicking File… Download As… and saving it to your computer.
Makes a great stocking stuffer!
