I have been looking through the 1940 census pages since they became available on April 2nd. The census was microfilmed during World War II, and recently digitized, but no indexing of names was done until they were released. I was pretty well convinced that I might not be able to find anything of interest for many months because of the difficulty of page by page browsing for the names I wanted. Happily, I was wrong. I have found my parents, grandparents, and all the aunts and uncles I have looked for in Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts censuses.
Ancestry.com has indexed Nevada and Delaware. Familysearch.org has several states indexed. Until the state you need is indexed, you will need an idea of where your relative was living so that you can find the Enumeration District (ED).
The easiest way to find the ED is to go to: http://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html. Here you can enter the state, county and town and the website will show you the ED’s for that town. In the case of big cities you can enter streets to narrow down your search. By the way if you don’t know the county, you can go to http://resources.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/townco.cgi which I have used for years, here you can enter a town name and the state abbreviation and it will tell you in what county that town lies. (I always enter the county along with the state and town in my family tree, because many records are only held at the county level, and it saves looking it up each time I want to search, say, a probate index.)
My grandfather was in Sangerville in 1940 and Sangerville had only two ED’s; 11-31 and 11-32. The first had 18 pages, the second had only 16. (I have yet to see a census ED with more than 50 pages.) It took only a few minutes to “flip” through the pages until I got to his. On Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org you can rotate the image to make it easy to read the street names written along the side of the census page. You can quickly eliminate most pages in an ED. For example, if you are searching for someone on Mill Street, you do not need to scan the names on the pages for Pleasant Street.
I have found mysteries; an aunt going by a name I never heard of. I found many relatives living in family groups and I wonder if this is a reflection of the slow recovery from the 1929 depression. After his wife’s death in 1938, my great Uncle Charles had moved in with his daughter and son-in-law. To my surprise, my Uncle Cley was still in Connecticut and not in California as I had expected. I found him first in 1939 and 1942 city directories on Ancestry.com, and then used the census to see who else was living there.
I knew my father and his siblings had stopped by my uncle’s bakery before school in the mornings, years before Uncle Eddie married my mother’s sister; but it wasn’t until I found the two families on the same street that I understood the connection. There is so much to be found in those old records. I hope you get to explore them yourself soon.
Editor’s note: Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft, who has been doing genealogy for over 30 years, is a freelance genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com. The Aroostook County Genealogical Society meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center, 163 Van Buren Road, Caribou, at 6:30 p.m. Guests and prospective members are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501.
