Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Information About 1950 U.S. Census Indexing Efforts

 Thanks to Joel Weintraub on Facebook for pointing me to this article on the LDS365 blog -- 1950 U.S. Census Data Coming April 2022.

One of the paragraphs introduces the 1950 U.S. Census Community Project:

"Upon its release, the 1950 U.S. Census Community Project, a joint initiative between FamilySearch, Ancestry, and other leading genealogy societies and organizations, will coordinate efforts to provide quick access to these digital images and to create a comprehensive index that will be searchable online."

Another paragraph describes how this will work:

"Supported by genealogy giants Ancestry and FamilySearch, along with local and national genealogy and historical organizations, this project will rally hundreds of thousands of volunteers to publish a high-quality, searchable online index of every name in the census.

"Rather than starting from scratch, volunteers will review Ancestry’s computer-generated index using groundbreaking handwriting recognition and cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies. This human review will verify that the data is accurate and complete. Volunteers can visit  FamilySearch.org/1950census to review their own family’s information and then review other records to refine the index before publication."

Joel opined on Facebook:

"It looks to me (but could be wrong) that they will not show their preliminary name index until it has been proofed by humans." 

Read the whole thing.  Thank you to Joel Weintraub for keeping close tabs on this endeavor.

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My comments:  

*  Do we know if the National Archives OCRed index will be available on the 1950 U.S. Census website on 1 April 2022?

*  Do we know when FamilySearch, Ancestry.com and other commercial sites will have the census images available online?  

*  I can't imagine that the volunteer effort to check the OCRed index will be done in one day or one week, especially if it is double (or triple) checked.  Perhaps one month?  We will see.


Copyright (c) 2022, Randall J. Seaver

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