Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Are You Ready for 1950 U.S. Census?

 It's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun! 

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music here) is to:

1) The 1950 United States Census will be available to search on 1 April 2022 - less than three weeks away. How have you prepared yourself to search it? Have you found 1950 addresses of your family members and persons of interest? Have you identified the State, County, Town and Enumeration District? Have you made a table of your findings so you can systematically find everyone on your list? What will you do with the information you gather?

2) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post. Be sure to leave a link with your answers in a comment.

Here's mine:

I have made a list of my census "targets" - my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my first cousins, and some of my second cousins, and those of my wife also.  

As we have been told, there will be a NARA census index when the census is released, which may or may not be accurate.  The census pages will be indexed by FamilySearch volunteers using the Ancestry handwriting recognition software as a starting point in the weeks after the census release.  This may take several months to complete for large states.  The fall back position for researchers is to use the Steve Morse and Joel Weintraub Enumeration District (ED) Finder to identify the ED for the address of each person on your target list, but you will have to browse the identified ED to find your target person.  

I used the City Directories collection on Ancestry.com to find the addresses for my target people. I used Google Maps to find the address in the current map, and identified the cross streets for the block with the target address.  Then I used the Steve Morse website Unified Census ED Finder (https://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html) for 1950 to identify the Enumeration district for each person on my list.  I put all of that information on a word processor table so that I can print it out and write on it as I find the people in the Census.  I will write down the Roll number, Page number and Line numbers for each target entry so I can find them again.  

here is the top of my list so far:

Finally, I will enter the Event into my RootsMagic family tree along with a family summery in a Note an a source citation, plus an image of the census page.  I will probably write blog posts detailing what I find, especially the entry for my birth family (I sure hope they - and me - were not missed!).  It will be interesting to see who the neighbors are around my home.

I think I'm ready...I am still finding cousins to add to my list but by 1 April I should be all set.  The biggest question I have is "will all of my relatives be enumerated?"  In the 1940 U.S. census, my grandmother, Alma Bessie (Richmond) Seaver (1882-1962), was not enumerated, but my grandfather was!

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