Making sense of the census

Palm School, Riverside, California, 1940

I’ve been caught up in the FamilySearch 1940 census indexing efforts for several weeks and find that while it temporarily diverted me from my personal research, it has been a great experience. There were many benefits aside from the obvious one: helping make this mass of information freely accessible to everyone.

One plus is that I find myself looking much more carefully at ALL census records (and having more appreciation for the indexers in general). 

When doing my own research I always paid attention to the primary information: name, gender, age, birthplace, occupation, etc., but have now become much more aware of the additional informational bits buried in various censuses. To keep them straight I even made a cheat sheet:

1900 shows the year and month of each person’s birth

 From 1900 on, immigration questions are included

1900 and 1910 show how many children the wife bore, and how many were still living

1910 also asked whether the adult males were Civil War veterans

1930 asked the adults their ages at first marriage and whether males were veterans; if so, which war

1940 has a wealth of information. A couple of the new questions are: where one lived in 1935,  and whether employed in 1939.  It also indicates who in the household answered the questions. It does NOT list the birthplaces of each person’s parents, though, except for two people who are singled out on each sheet to provide additional information.

There are other questions found in various years, but these are the ones I found most important to keep in mind.

While Ancestry has proclaimed its completion of the 1940 indexing (done overseas on contract, so I have read), I’m awaiting release of the rest of the FamilySearch indexes, because I know how carefully they’ve been developed and vetted. Will, of course, eventually use both. 

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By the way, "History Detectives" is back for a tenth season! My local PBS station, KQED, actually preempted the first episode for their interminable begging, and hardly publicizes it at all but the program is now up and running.  Check your local schedule. 

Later:  Not again!  The schedule shows KQED will continue to preempt it for the rest of the month. Boo! Hiss!  Watch the episodes on your computer.

PS: The cheery group shown above is my first grade class.  Mrs. Mueller was one of the best teachers I ever had.

Tiptoeing Through the Tangles

Sometimes I think genealogy is like working free an endless clump of yarn with lots of loose ends.  Will I come to a hopeless knot, or work long hours only to reach a frayed end? The release of the 1940 census should provide major clues for many of us -- and then, too, it will probably introduce some new twists, knots and abrupt finishes.

So, how many of you have done the Enumeration District search for people in this most-recently released census? I was delighted to find my own family, and some neighbors (sure enough, one of my playmates had a father who was in the California Highway Patrol).  But mostly I think I can wait for the indexes to be completed before I do any more digging.  Meanwhile there is plenty to do in preparation.

After making a general list of possibles, as I wrote last time, I went back and pared it down to people who are actually related to me.  That helps a lot!  The next step was to look at my records for each one and make sure I had earlier information, including the 1930 census. This is a good exercise in any case, because it is all too easy to overlook certain records we shelved long ago. I am still in the midst of this, of course, but it is fascinating to be able to update information with all the ever-growing number of online resources.  (When I started, the 1860 census did not even have a printed index, and nothing was “online” because the Internet didn’t exist.)

Some of my recent discoveries have been intriguing.  The youngsters who lied about their ages when they went over the state line to marry, and had a child six months later.  The 1960’s children with names like “Tiffany Dawn,” and “Zakkary.”  The teacher who died in Australia but was buried in Indiana.

I particularly enjoy the story of the “enterprising young family man,” (so described in a website for an Illinois town) who was a tinsmith by trade. He is described as having boosted the local economy by employing several men to produce stills during Prohibition for a Chicago mobster.  That sort of acts as a counterbalance to the string of teetotalling preachers in that same family line.

On another subject, how many of you watch “History Detectives” on PBS? They are in reruns at present, but reportedly are planning for their tenth season. (I hope it is true!) It is fun to watch them interview the owner of an artifact with possible historical significance, and tease out the important clues. They always ask “What is it you’d like to find out about this object / book / letter?”  That’s something we need to keep in mind as we race in and out of the branches of our family trees, trying to untangle them. 

What is it we really want to find out?

Counting people, counting days ...

With the 1940 census coming out so soon, all the talk is about how to make the best use of its information, and, particularly, how to work with it before the indexing comes online.

If you know about Steve Morse’s “one-step” tools (at stevemorse.org , NOT “.com”) you probably have a handle on how to start looking for people in many different files.  If not, you really need to go to his site and do some exploring.  Great tools!

Since I was born before 1940, my interest in this census is more than genealogical.  I’d love to see the neighbors’ names and their family situations at the time (whose mother was the old lady in the household next door?  Was my playmate’s father really a policeman?). Morse’s procedures make it possible to zero in on specific “enumeration districts,” which provide a means of finding households without a name index if you can locate the street.

Knowing this, my first aim has been to create a list of potential search candidates.  I have Reunion, the genealogy program of choice for many Mac users, but the process is probably similar for most programs which have a “search” feature -- though the terminology may differ.

I selected “Find” in the topmost menu bar, then “Anything.”  This brought up a form which allows for selecting those persons who meet a particular set of conditions.  In my case I chose individuals (U.S. residents, of course) who were known to have died after 1939. This produced a list of over 300 people.

But I also have many persons without known death dates who may have still been alive in 1940. Of course if they were born in 1790, it’s not too likely they were counted in this most recent census. So I chose two conditions: persons born after 1850 (being generous), and with a [blank] date of death. This garnered another 250 names.

The next step was to note the surnames used by the married women as that is how they will be shown in the census. (I did it one name at a time; your program features may allow the spouse’s name to be listed in the original report.) 


Later: I found a way to list the spouses' names, and any other desired data by -- of all things -- consulting Reunion's online manual. Highly recommended!

These results gave me a great starting point.  Of course some people are so obscurely connected I may ignore them, or they have been so thoroughly researched I can set them aside (but -- just take a look at all the interesting questions that were asked in that census! They are listed on the National Archives website in the section listed as: 1940 Federal Population Census, Pt. 1, General Information.)

This method of developing a list of likely candidates is useful for other searches as well. You might devise lists of males born between particular dates who would have been required to register for the drafts in WW I or WW II.  These records may show the person’s next of kin, where he lived at the time of registering, and a description of his physical appearance.  

On your mark, get set, go!