The images of the 1940 Federal Census are online now and available although only retrievable by enumeration district. Ancestry.com is indexing the information alphabetically faster than I expected but I still believe it will take months to complete.
I took the opportunity of looking up a couple of entries. The first entry I looked up was my dad and his mother. In 1940 they were living in a two-flat at Clayton Avenue and Hampton in St. Louis that my dad had inherited from his grandfather. They rented out the other flat and, judging from the information in the census, that and the rents from the other properties my dad had inherited comprised most of their income which was by no means princely. Both of them had been living there since my dad’s grandfather died ten years earlier.
The entry was interesting in the insight it conveyed about the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s. My dad was a lawyer; he’d passed the bar in 1937 but he couldn’t find work as a lawyer. In 1940 he listed his occupation as “assistant editor” of a newspaper, the old St. Louis Star. I’ve mentioned he’d been an editor there before. This fills in the timing.
As I expected my grandmother didn’t work outside the home. If my recollections of the state of the flat where she was still living ten years later are any gauge, she didn’t do much inside the home, either.
The other listing was for the house I’m living in now. The first owner of the house was living there at the time with his wife and kids. Interestingly, in the census he said he’d been living there five years previously which means that the house is a bit older than we’d thought.
I also checked out Jim and Marion Jordan who had lived a couple of blocks away. Yes, we live in the neighborhood Wistful Vista is in. Fibber McGee and Molly had already moved to the West Coast by that time and they weren’t living there any more.
Off topic, but what did you find about a country ham?