Friday, April 6, 2012

Ancestry.com Using Steve Morse 1940 Census ED Finder

To me, Steve Morse, Joel Weintraub and their team of volunteers did the genealogical community a tremendous favor by creating the Unified 1940 Census ED Finder.  It works, it is fast, and it saves time for everyone trying to find their target families in the 1940 census.

Ancestry.com has incorporated the Unified 1940 Census ED Finder into their FREEly available (until the end of 2013) 1940 Census page - http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2442.

The top of the 1940 Census on Ancestry.com page looks like this (two screens below):



Just below the "Enumeration District" box in the screen above are two radio buttons for

*  "Already know the cross streets?  Narrow down the potential district quickly with this browsing method.  Powered by the One-Step work of Stephen Morse & Joel Weintraub"

*  "Already know the district from 1930?  Converts 1930 census district numbers to 1940 numbers.

Clicking either of these buttons opens a set of boxes to help the user find the Enumeration District number using the Steve Morse 1940 ED Finder process.

I clicked on the first radio button, and filled in the boxes one at a time:



After adding the state, county, residence street, two cross streets and the back street, two matching Enumeration Districts were listed:


clicking on one of those ED numbers brought up the first page of the 1940 census pages for that Enumeration District.

Joel emailed me this morning, saying:

"Ancestry has now (with our permission) included our data sets into their website.  One of our requirements was to not put the information solely behind their pay wall, and to remove the data sets when they start to use their own street information when they complete their full index."

WELL DONE, good and faithful servants of the genealogy community!!!

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/04/ancestrycom-using-steve-morse-1940.html

copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

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