Pursuant to federal law, which provides for census information becoming available for public use 72 years after the actual enumeration, today the National Archives released the Federal Census for 1940. The release did not go without a hitch:
An embarrassing moment for the National Archives and Records Administration: At a ceremony this morning to unveil the 1940 Census records online for the first time, the images of the handwritten records did not load.
Census Director Robert Groves was all set to look up his grandfather who lived in St. Louis in 1940 but the data kept loading, and loading, and loading.
The same was true for professional and amateur genealogists across the USA who eagerly jumped on their computers first thing to delve in to the records.
“What a disappointment,” says Angela Walton-Raji, a Catonville, Md., resident who was ready to look up records on her father who would have been in Fort Smith, Ark., in 1940. “They had a big ceremony and the demo didn’t work. It still hasn’t loaded.”
Initially you will only be able to access the information by enumeration district. In other words you’ll need to know where the person you’re looking for lived in 1940 and translate that street address into the enumeration district used by the Department of the Census. Fortunately, clever people have already prepared for that and there are tools available to help you figure out the enumeration district of a particular street address.
An army of volunteers is preparing to index the 3.8 million pages of census data by name. I suspect that the availability of indexed census data will dribble in over the next few months or even years.
From the point of view of my own geneaological researches the Federal Census for 1940 is only marginally interesting. I already have complete information for everybody in my direct line. I could use it to learn more about, say, my mother’s cousins but I already know quite a bit about them and anything more is only peripherally interesting to me. They’re all dead now, no kids, and whatever family history they might have told me about is long gone along with any family pictures or memorabilia.
If the 1940 census is more complete than, say, the 1930 was it’s barely possible that I could track down relatives we’ve lost touch with, e.g. my grandfather’s younger brother. Outside of some vague family stories about his having moved west we just don’t know what happened to him. His grandchildren probably know less about our family history than I do. I could tell them a few things but, surprising to me for whom where we’ve been is an important factor in assessing where I am, most people don’t seem to care.
Yeah, not a big issue for me either. The gaps for me are in the mid 19th century and early 20th century on my mother’s side. I did recently have a breakthrough, though: My brother and I spent many hours over the past couple of months and we can now trace the paternal line another 150 years from the 1770’s to the mid 1600’s when my 8th Great Grandfather came to the US on a prison ship after the battle of Worchester. That is probably the end of the line though, as the clan holdings and most of the records were destroyed by Cromwell’s forces. Those that remained were lost in the early 19th century, so very little is known of my clan beyond the Chiefs and their immediate family. I’m not at all sad about that – our goal was always to trace our line back to Scotland and we’ve now done that.
My gaps are mostly in the first quarter of the 19th century or in Europe. I think