Wednesday, March 7, 2012

SDGS Meeting on Saturday, 10 March - Joel Weintraub

The San Diego Genealogical Society program on 10 March (St. Andrews Lutheran Church, 8350 Lake Murray Blvd, just south of Jackson Drive) will start at 9:30 a.m. with Morning Coffee.

The speaker will be Joel Weintraub.  He was born and raised in Manhattan, became interested in genealogy 12 years ago, and volunteered at the National Archives and Records Administration in Southern California for nine years.  Joel started transcribing streets within census districts in 2001 to help researchers search the 1930 U.S. Census (released in 2002).  He was joined in the venture by David Kehs and Stephen Morse in 2002, and together they have produced a number of census searching utilities for both the federal and the New York State censuses on the Morse One Step Website.  Joel has been working on finder aids for the 1940 census since 2005, and has given talks on that census since 2006.

Three weeks after this talk, the 1940 Census population forms will be put online, freely accessible.  In the first hour, Joel will discuss the background of the census questions, the controversies surrounding some of the questions, and what to look for when you see your family's census sheets.  He will have original census documents to illustrate this part of the talk.

In the second hour, Joel will deal with how one will search this census for family members by location since there will be no name index when it becomes public.  There are location tools (census maps, district definitions, street and location indexes, etc.) available for free on the National Archives and the One-Step website (www.stevemorse.org) which Joel will discuss.  Get the addresses of your 1940 family before this meeting, and Joel will show you how you can use that information to find which census districts cover those locations.  To prepare for this talk, go through the tutorial/quiz at http://stevemorse.org/census/quiz.php with your 1940 addresses.

There will be a 15 minute break between the two presentations.

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Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

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