Friday, April 6, 2012

Thankful there is NO index for the 1940 census!

I can only speak for myself, but if you're reading, I wonder if you've experienced any of the same feelings this week.

It's been just five days now that family history enthusiasts (beginner, intermediate and professional alike) have had access to the nearly 4 million digital images that make up the 1940 Census. In that time, there have been a flood of news articles noting the surge in online traffic to leading websites and the growing interest in family history in recent years. This is all great to see. Also great to see the volunteer spirit that is behind the 1940 U.S. Census Community Project, a national service project to index 1940 census images.

I don't recall for certain the first time I tried to find my family in U.S. census records, but think it was about 1984-1985 while I was living just 15 minutes or so from the Northeast Regional archives in Waltham, MA (just west of Boston). Something about looking through census records and passenger lists for hours on microfilm that captivated me. Still does in some respects.

In recent years, many family historians, myself included, have been spoiled by the ability to visit a web site, type a name or two into a search box, and within a few minutes we often find ourselves connected with digital images of historical records containing details for our family. That's certainly great and a huge time saver, but I'm realizing something this week and wonder if I'm alone or not in my thought process.

Online access to such a variety of information has made me a bit lazy. There, I've put it out there for all to read. This past few days, I've found myself remembering what it used to be like to do real research. With no index of the 1940 census, I've been forced to look at birth and marriage certificates, city directories, maps (both old and new), and a variety of other sources to pinpoint the location of one or more family members in/around April 1940. With that information in hand, the amazing One-Step Tools (especially the Unified 1940 Census ED Finder by Steve Morse, Joel Weintraub, and volunteers) certainly are a tremendous time saver.

This experience has reminded me why I've grown to love genealogy research over so many years. I learn so much in the process. While looking for family members, as well as a few celebrities, I found myself doing a lot of unexpected side-reading this week. Reviewing documents or pages or unrelated articles from the 1930s, just to help me better understand things. What fun to learn things by accident. To set off looking for one thing and find several others in the process. Sometimes never even finding what it was I was searching for in the first place, but still I learned something about a different time and place.

Tonight I had nearly a dozen people (actually, I should say families) I wanted to find listed on 1940 population schedules. I had a 150% success rate! Found all the families I was looking for, but because I was forced to browse through many pages to get to them, I made quite a few accidental discoveries in the process. Turns out there is some truth to people who marry the girl next door. Even if she didn't exactly next door, I found a few situations where the future bride and groom were living less than 100 lines away from each other on census schedules.



One exciting moment was finding my dad's family at 52 Lafayette Street, Waterbury CT (ED 5-245). The 8th of 10 children, they are ALL living in the household. The ONLY census that will ever show his family in this fashion, the children ranged in age from 22 to 9 months. Had the census been 1 year earlier, we'd miss the youngest child. A year or two later, and several sons were off to war. To find my 57-year old grandfather with his 42-year old wife and all 10 children, that's a special document to have.

Certainly it will be great to have a name index in a few months time. That will help me find a few of the stubborn cases for which I can't seem to find a street address, but in the mean time, I'm exciting to sharpen my entire base of research skills AND my skills of critical thinking for how to approach a problem. Both had a layer of dust on them, something made possible by the 'search box syndrome' so common now in genealogy.

Happy Hunting!!

Monday, April 2, 2012

1940 Census - So many images, so little time!

With nearly 4 million images now available online for browsing, it's been amazing to see how excited the genealogical community is about the 1940 census. Even 'genea-friends' from other parts of the globe seem to share in our excitement. They are, after all, our kind of people too. The type who understand our passion. I was honored and thankful to have a virtual front-row seat for the some of the events as they unfolded on launch day in Washington D.C.

As an official spokesperson for The 1940 U.S. Census Community Project, I took a train from my home in Connecticut yesterday (Sunday, 01 April) and rode the rails for nearly 5 hours to our nations capitol. I thought about my great grandparents and how they would have had to travel by rail to central Connecticut after their arrival through the Port of New York. Although my trip was s little different with WiFi, a laptop, an iPad, iPhone, Google+ Hangouts while zipping down the tracks.

Today was the day many of us has been waiting for. As much as I wanted to be at my laptop, ready to pounce on images from Connecticut, I sat in a television studio somewhere in central-DC, being hooked up to locations throughout the United States for live television and radio interviews - more than two dozen in all. It seems the interest in family history has never been stronger and we have never been more fortunate given the technology available to us as we pursue our hobby/passion.

As I type this, I'm on an AmTrak train back to Connecticut. It's 7:30pm Eastern and within the last 30 minutes, I've just seen my first 1940 Census Population Schedule neatly filled in with names and all the pertinent details. This particular census enumerator (Marjory E. Boman) did a wonderful job listing the names of the many residents of the Beth-El General Hospital, Colorado Springs (El Paso County), Colorado. No connection to me or my family, but I really wanted to see an image and this is the first that was available. It came courtesy of FamilySearch.org, one of 5 states they currently had images loaded for. Other sites (Archives.gov, Archives.com, and Ancestry.com) had some images loaded, but I've not yet been able to view any. FindMyPast.com and MyHeritage.com will also be offering images for the U.S. Census, but neither appeared to have any 1940 images loaded as of yet.



I've seen a few Tweets, Facebook, and Google+ posts which are critical of the launch efforts. I'm disappointed to see that. I know that most family history enthusiasts are thrilled and very appreciative of the hard work that all the organizations (and so many unnamed individuals) have done for many, many months to prepare for today. Let's take a moment to THANK them for their efforts, not ridicule them for the fact that sometimes even the best of technology can't respond to our high expectations of every record, free, full searchable, at precisely the minute of launch for millions of us who want to view our own grandparents records.

» Thank you U.S. Census Bureau.
» Thank you National Archives and Records Administration.
» Thank you Ancestry.com
» Thank you Archives.com (Inflection)
» Thank you FamilySearch.org
» Thank you FindMyPast.com (brightsolid)
» Thank you MyHeritage.com
» Thank you SteveMorse.org (Steve Morse, Joel Weintraub, and all their volunteers!!) and a very sincere thank you to the many, many others whom I may not have mentioned here, but only because I don't even know all that goes on behind the scenes to pull off something this big.

It's a fun day for our industry, let's celebrate it. The stories will unfold in the weeks, months and years to come as a result of the data we will find in these 1940 census records!