Genealogy is a skill that requires patience, perserverence, and personal investment to develop. Doing family research online has added a new dimension to the art, but caution is warrented. Studying one's genealogy is not as simple as typing your family name into a search engine (such as Google (tm)) and looking at the links that look promising, there's more to it than that, a lot more. When pursuing information, it is always wise to verify your sources and not to embellish or distort fact in any way. It's very tempting to believe that a person or relationship is what you (the researcher) desire rather than as the facts indicate or fail to indicate. Caution and discretion is essential.
The US government is required by law to conduct a census every ten years for purposes of administrating government for the benefit of citizens of the United States of America. As stated in the Department of Commerce Strategic Plan, the Census department goal is to "develop relevant, timely, and accurate national and community economic and household statistics for decision making", p39.
The US Census is not responsible for recording specifics of individuals. Decennial Census of Population and Housing data collected by the census is only released for public use 72 years after collection. For additional information on census policy and practice, please consult the US Census department web site at: http://www.census.gov. Specific details regarding genealogy using Census data products can be found at the Census web site under page http://www/census.gov/genealogy/www/.
The primary facility for dissemination of census products is the American Factfinder web site at http://factfinder.census.gov.
Personal histories are plentiful. The problem is, they are not definitive, are often ambigious, and are often contradictory. Even if Aunt Ada told you on her deathbed, it's not fact unless documented in legal document or headstone. Even then, it could be wrong... legally definitive, but wrong. Due to copyrite concerns, personal histories are only republished if usable from a commonly available source or permission is given. This severely limits the amount of personal information that can be repeated on the site, but is necessary to preserve copyrite and right to privacy.