Have you experienced the 1940 US Census yet? I finally got
around to it last night. I have been traveling a lot since Friday. On Friday I
flew from Nashville to Burbank to give a speech to the DNA interest group of
the Southern California Genealogy Society and sign copies of my Crash Course in Genealogy book. On
Sunday I returned to Nashville and prepared for a road trip with my wife to
Virginia Beach to spend Easter with two of our grandsons---Alex almost 3 and
Devin 6 months. Along the road in Hickory, NC, I met for the first time a 6th
cousin who has also travelled through life as David Dowell. He is one year and
three days younger than me. As result of this literal coast-to-coast jaunt, the
Census did not come to the top of my priorities until last night after the
grandsons were in bed.
As you may know the images of the 1940 US Census were
released on Monday by the US National Archives (NARA). It will be several
months before name indexes will be available for all of the 130 million people
who were enumerated. Indexers just got access to the images on Monday along
with the rest of us. MyHeritage.com is claiming to have
the first index to these images even though it covers only a tiny fraction of
the entire country.
For my own first foray into this fantastic treasure house of
family information, I picked an easy search. My maternal grandparents were
living in the same small town in 1940 that they had been in 1930. That is
important because the census records are now searchable by location. My
grandparents were living in Breckenridge, MO. According to the censuses
Breckenridge had a population of 828 in 1930 but had shrunk to 728 in 1940.
This made Breckenridge an ideal size for my first attempt to find family
members.
First I looked up my grandparents in the 1930 Census and
discovered that they had lived in Enumeration District 13-1 of Caldwell County
during that enumeration. An enumeration district is the area assigned to one
census taker. Many of the enumeration districts in the 1940 Census are the same
as those for 1930. That was the case for Breckenridge.
When I went to http://1940census.archives.gov and searched for
Enumeration District 13-1 of Caldwell County, I got immediate gratification.
Enumeration District 13-1 had 22 images. On the first of those 22 images was a
listing for my Uncle Frank Adams and his family. My grandparents were a little
more elusive. I didn’t find them until I had scanned down to image 7. I
discovered that two other uncles were living with my grandparents along with
two of my first-cousins. The cousins are twins who were then nine years old. Their
father is listed as widowed. None of this was a particular surprise.
However, a feature of the 1940 Census is information about
where individuals were living 5 years previously. My grandparents are listed as
living in the “same house.” That was as expected. However, I didn’t know that
my Uncle Ray had been living in Cody, Wyoming, in 1935 and that my Uncle Clark;
the father of the twins had been living in Ralls County, Missouri. Is that location
significant? That is where my grandfather was born in 1870. My grandfather had
moved across the state by 1893; but extended family still lived in Ralls
County.
Another innovation of the 1940 Census is that a symbol was placed by the person in the family unit who provided the information to the census taker. In the case of the Adams family household of my grandparents, my grandmother was the informant. This is indicated by an "X" with a circle drawn around it following her name.
My next venture into the 1940 Census will try something a
little more challenging, but I don’t think I’m ready to try my wife’s ancestors
in Chicago yet. What has been your experience with the 1940 Census?
