Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Tuesday's Tip - Find 1940 EDs Using Steve Morse One-Step Location Tools

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:   Find the Enumeration Districts (ED) in 1940 where your ancestral families lived using the 1940 Census Tutorial Quiz (http://stevemorse.org/census/quiz.php) on the Steve Morse One-Step website.

Why should you do this?  If you are going to search for your ancestral families in the 1940 U.S. Census before there are every-name indexes available (projected to be the last quarter of 2012), you will need to know the Enumeration District for every address.  When you know the ED, you can then search for your ancestral family  by looking at the images one by one online at http://1940census.archives.gov.

For a great tutorial on how to use the 1940 U.S. Census Tutorial Quiz, watch Thomas MacEntee's "Navigating the 1940 U.S. Census" webinar (which is available for free only through 19 March) at http://www.millenniacorp.com/_videos/webinars/2012-03-07-1940/2012-03-07-1940.html.

The Unified 1940 U.S. Census ED Finder on the Steve Morse One-Step website is at http://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html.  Because I knew where my two Carringer families lived in San Diego in 1940 (from city directories and family papers), I was able to determine the Enumeration district for them within 30 seconds.  On the Unified ED Finder site, I entered the state, county, city, street number, street name, and three cross or back streets (all from drop-down menus).  It found EDs 62-63B and 62-63A.  I looked at the ED descriptions and am very sure that the Carringer residences are in ED 62-63B.


If you don't know the cross and back streets, you can use Google Maps to see the current street names around the block that contains your ancestors address.  Input the address to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) and note the cross and back streets.


 If the current streets did not exist in 1940, then take a look at the 1940  Enumeration District maps on the National Archives Online Public Access site (http://www.archives.gov/research/search/).  Enter the terms [1940 census maps yourcity yourstate] into the search box.  For my case, I entered [1940 census maps san diego california] into the search box.  You then have to look through all of the matches that come up.  San Diego city has 142 EDs, and after clicking through several map pages, I found the block where my ancestors lived in ED 63.


The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/03/tuesdays-tip-find-1940-eds-using-steve.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Great ideas! Thanks, Randy. Definitely bookmarking this post for my census prep.

Dorene from Ohio said...

Thanks for the tip! I already found the 1940 ED for my little unincorporated part of Erie County, Ohio!