Looking around for my Miller ancesters in Licking county I've made some analysis on why I don't quite like things as they are at present. I mean, I do like that it's not too expensive to subscribe to Ancestry or someone else for access to census images and some indexes, but they only take you so far and I constantly get the feeling I'm re-inventing the wheel every time I start tracing things down.

Fact is there are tons of people researching ancesters even for one county and if they got together and did things once and for all they could make it better for all in the future. Are there gigantic problems to creating family trees based just on the census records? Let me give a quick overview of what I have in mind.

I'll do Monroe Twp since that's one township where I have lots of ancesters. Typically the census records have 20-50 pages. Each page might have 15 families averaging 3-4 individuals. If we're talking all the census from 1850 to 1930, i.e. all the ones which contain everyone's name, we'd have about 400 pages or so. If we had 10 people each commit to taking a page a week and adding it to a tree (using census years and pages as "ancesters" of the individual families, the entire corpus of Monroe Twp census data could be available as a GEDCOM in less than a year. The mechanics of say when you could link a family from one census to that in another census would have to be hashed out, but even a fairly badly done effort might save lots of people lots of time. What does everyone think?