These records include details about famed personalities such as Lauren Bacall, Al Capone, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Houdini, who according to the 1925 census was born in the United States, even though most biographies say he was born in Hungary. "Given the complexity of their own language, reading and recognizing characters from other languages comes easier," he said.Īlso Wednesday, another historic treasure trove appears on the Internet for the first time: census information compiled separately by New York state for 19, indexed by name. Some of the work of transcribing handwritten census records into a computerized index was done by workers in an office outside the southern city of Dongguan with "very strong character recognition abilities," said Todd Jensen, who heads the document preservation service at, a Provo, Utah-based family history company that's releasing the online New York census for 1940 using their new name index. Indexing by name is crucial to cracking the until-now closed book of that year's census, which by law could not be released for 72 years and is therefore the most recently available one. When the census was first released, "if you didn't know exactly where someone lived in 1940, you couldn't find them," Braverman said. "That's the exciting aspect about this - the ability to search the lifetime of our mothers and fathers," said Debra Braverman, a New York-based independent forensic genealogist with clients seeking information for trust funds and estates. Census experts say the New York data is of national interest because tens of millions of Americans have roots in this gateway to the United States through Ellis Island, and many can now dig for more personal information.