Tuesday, June 28, 2011

1940 Census Searching Tools Announced

...
Joel Weintraub sent this press release today:

----------------------------------

28 June 2011

In less than 10 months the 1940 US Population Schedules will become public. It will not be name indexed, so it will be necessary to do an address search in order to find families.  Address searching involves knowing the ED (enumeration district) in which the address is located..   The National Archives (NARA)  earlier this year indicated they had plans to make available in 2011 the 1940  ED maps of cities and counties, and ED descriptions,  but their recent move to consider having a 3rd party host all the images may have appreciably set back this timetable.

The only website that currently has location tools for the 1940 census is the Steve Morse One Step site
(http://stevemorse.org).  There are several such tools there, and it could be  overwhelming to figure out which tool to use when.  There is a tutorial that attempts to clarify it http://stevemorse.org/census/intro.html) and an extensive FAQ (http://stevemorse.org/census/faq.htm).

We are announcing the opening of another educational utility to help people learn about the different 1940  locational search tools on the One Step site, and information about the 1940 census itself.  It is in the form of a quiz, and should help many, many genealogists quickly learn how to search an unindexed census by location.  The new utility is at: http://stevemorse.org/census/quiz.php and is called "How to Access the 1940 Census in One Step".  Not only is it informative, we hope it is entertaining.

Thanks

Joel Weintraub
Steve Morse


Joel Weintraub
Dana Point, CA
http://members.cox.net/census1940/

-------------------------------------------------

This One-Step Tool is excellent - fast and accurate (as I expected!).  I was able to find the ED of my maternal grandparents home in about 15 seconds because I knew the street address and the cross streets.  Very cool!

Readers - this is how we're going to start looking for our families in the 1940 Census.  I recommend that you practice this.  Make your list of "target" families, and determine their addresses (from family records or city directories). 

My thanks to Joel and Steve for their hard work in developing this tool to help all of us search the 1940 Census efficiently.  This tool was in development for several years.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Can anyone remember how long it took for the 1930 census to be indexed? (Current indexing software and higher volunteer participation in such projects should beat that time for the 1940 census, I hope!)