1940 census released tomorrow

[The Storyteller]

So anybody else ready for this? First time ever, digital online release. Here is the link...

http://1940census.archives.gov/

I have already lined up all of the enumeration districts I expect my people to be in. Without an index, it's going to be like an Easter Egg hunt.

[JaneV2.0]

I'll probably go through Ancestry.com. I don't expect HeritageQuest (via my library system) will have it right away.

[Tiam]

Hard for someone desperate for information who has none.

[The Storyteller]

I'll probably go through Ancestry.com. I don't expect HeritageQuest (via my library system) will have it right away.

It's directly accessible through the link I provided from the national archives. You don't need a vendors unless you want an index. That is what is different this time.

[jennipurrr]

I was trying to access the site and it seems to be down. Maybe the traffic was too much?

[JaneV2.0]

It's directly accessible through the link I provided from the national archives. You don't need a vendors unless you want an index. That is what is different this time.

HeritageQuest is free, as well. I use it a lot. It has a pretty good search function.

[The Storyteller]

I was trying to access the site and it seems to be down. Maybe the traffic was too much?
Yeah, all those genealogy nuts crashed it. It froze up right out of the gate. I didn't even get one search in.

[Tiam]

Yes, millions of hits. Crashed it.

[The Storyteller]

Found both my mom (Richmond, CA) and dad (Latimer county, OK). Helped knowing about where they lived so I could narrow it down to a couple of enumeration districts and just search page by page.

Here is my mom Rose Ray with her first husband George and my oldest sister:

http://www.backyardchickens.com/image/id/6819634/width/900/height/900/flags/LL

[CathyA]

Very Interesting! Funny how they put who's the head of the family. Do they still do that?
I'll give it a try sometime. See that stuff gives me a strange feeling about time passing............

[sweetana3]

We found my mom and she was a movie ticket taker. Her younger sister worked in retail and her even younger brother at 14 was listed as being a magazine subscription seller. Mom made $676 a year and her dad made $1250.

[Miss Cellane]

I found both my parents who both lived in Boston at the time, but in very different neighborhoods.

My dad's family--well, somehow they have my aunt down as a boy, with a boy's name. My best guess on that one is that my grandmother used her nickname, which isn't a real name, but a smooshing together of her first and second names, and the census taker mis-heard it as a boy's name, and took the gender off that. That and the fact that there were 6 boys and only one girl in the family, so the census taker must have missed the fact that there was a girl in there. And my aunt had a twin brother, so that might have been another factor.

I was surprised at the ethnic population of the neighborhood, though. I certainly expected a lot of Scottish, Irish and English surnames, but there were also a substantial number of people who had emigrated from Syria, long enough ago that their children had been born in the US. My grandfather had friends around the corner that he referred to as his "Arab friends" but I had no idea that there were so many. What could have lured them to the cold, snowy, icy streets of Boston?

For Dad's family, I had to slog through two enumeration districts--I knew the exact address, but I think they split his street down the middle--the left side in one district and the right side in the other.

My mother's family lived in a neighborhood with lots of Irish, but also Russian, Polish and Lithuanian immigrants. There are several houses listed with a married couple and then 10-15 lodgers, all of whom are over age 60. I wonder if they were early versions of assisted living homes.

Mom lived with her grandparents, her parents and her sister in the same house for decades. There were a great many multi-generational houses in her area, including one one her street where there is a married couple, plus her mother and 4 of her sisters all sharing one roof. I kind of feel sorry for that guy, whoever he was.

Both sides of the family have kept pretty good records since arriving in the US, so there wasn't much new information to be gleaned from the census, except for my aunt's sex change. We do now have the street number for Mom's house; we'd always had the street name, because they'd always refer to when "we were living on Smith Street."