Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Using the MyHeritage 1940 U.S. Census Images

MyHeritage also has 1940 United States Census images available for some states, with more being added daily.  These images currently are FREELY available to anyone without a registration.  The 1940 Census collection is at http://www.myheritage.com/1940census.

I found that MyHeritage had the Massachusetts census images, including for my father's home town of Leominster.  I found members of his family, but not him, in Enumeration District 14-181 at 90 Main Street where the 1940 Leominster City Directory said the family resided.

Here is the process I used to access the 1940 U.S. Census for Leominster, Massachusetts on the MyHeritage website:

1)  The MyHeritage 1940 U.S. census page (http://www.myheritage.com/1940census):


2)  I selected Massachusetts from the dropdown menu for the State:


3)  I typed in "Worcester" for the County, "Leominster" for the City/Town, and "14-181" for the Enumeration District:


I could have skipped the County and city/Town and just typed in the Enumeration district if I knew it.  If I did not know the ED, I would have received a list of EDs with the County and City/Town, or with just the County.

4)  When I clicked "Search" I saw the summary for ED 14-181:


The ED boundary definition is provided in the screen above.

I could have edited my search using the "Edit search" button on the left sidebar.

5)  I clicked on the link for the ED (state-county-town) (or on the thumbnail image):


The screen above tells me the Roll Number of the NARA population schedule microfilm (1651) and has a list of the pages in this ED (however, they are not linked to the images).

Below the text is an image window that shows the first image in the ED.

6)    Scrolling down, I can see the census page image.  There are zoom in and out buttons, and arrows to advance the page above the image.


The user can navigate up and down or right and left by holding down my left mouse button and moving it (I call it the "magic hand").

The user cannot select a page - s/he has to advance the page using the left or right arrows.

7)  If the user wants to save an image, s/he can put the cursor over the image, click the right mouse button (Windows) and select "Save As" from the menu options:


This was very fast and easy to do - I saved all 32 images for this ED in several minutes.

These images are really easy to browse through - the images load very quickly (they are smaller than the NARA images - the MyHeritage images are about 900 kb in size).  The user has to use the zoom on each image.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/04/using-myheritage-1940-us-census-images.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

2 comments:

Tracy said...

I have searched through two EDs at My Heritage. The first ED was 7-51 in Bloomfield, Essex, NJ and it worked just fine. I was able to view all the pages and scroll between them. Then I went to 7-49 of the same town and there were not any arrows on the top of the images to move between the images of that ED. Those were the only two I tried so hope it's just a fluke and they get it fixed soon.

Mariann said...

Thank you for this step-by-step list of directions about how to use My Heritage. It sounds somewhat easier than the government site, although the Stephen Morse directions did get me to the 30 pages of census in my ancestors' county, which I immediately paged through (with the new LION operating system on the MacPro).

Now that I've written a family memoir trying to understand my ancestors' minds and hearts when they were slaveowners (@MariannSRegan has a book blog), I am searching for my mixed-race relatives, second and third cousins.

After I had gone through the 30 pages using Morse's approach, and found no one with our surname, I happened to click on another part of the page and realized there were 32 other sets of census records that I had not realized were there. Well, I'm on a learning curve.

I think I'll try the MyHeritage method the next time I venture. It sounds very smooth, the way you explain it. Thank you!