The arrangement of surnames on a page of the schedules is in the order in which the census taker gathered it as he went door to door. Searching for a particular name on the schedules involves scanning each page from top to bottom until the desired name is located. For large counties, this may entail scanning thousands of names in no particular order that makes sense to the researcher. This process is tedious but the method is simple. Fortunately, most census records are indexed.
Indexes enable researchers to locate an entry in the schedules without having to scan name by name.
Usually, an index is limited to a certain geographic area, such as a county, group of counties, or a state. In 1880 the government began producing indexes for individual states. Many privately produced indexes are available for census records prior to 1880. The EWGS Holdings Book will indicate the variety of indexes available at the library. Soundex Soundex is a coded surname index based on the way a surname sounds rather than how it is spelled.