As you may have heard, the 1940 census has just been released online. I've been trying off and on to get into it, have two ED numbers that should nail down the street address for my relatives in April of that year but I can't get into the system any further than that. I guess due to the high demand. Time will tell.

 

Got in this AM and found some interesting info. The census printed form summary headings are hard to read (72 year old print, etc.) but I took the time to summarize them below for anyone interested.

Line No.

1- Street, avenue, road, etc.
2- House number
3- Number of household in order of visitation
4- Home owned (O) or rented (R)
5- Value of home, if owned, or monthly rental, if rented
6- Does this household live on a farm?
7- Name of each person in house
8- Relationship to head of house
A- Code
9- Sex, Male (M), Female (F)
10- Color or race
11- Age at last birthday
12- Marital status- Single (S), Married (M), Widowed (Wd), Divorced (D)
13- Attended school or college any time since March 1, 1940
14- Highest grade of school completed
B- code
15- Place of birth, if US give State
16- Citizenship of foreign born
17- In what place did the person live on April 1, 1935 – City if more than 2,500 or R if other
18- 1935- County
19- 1935- State
20- 1935- On a farm?
D- code
21- Was this person ‘at work’ during week of March 24-30?
22- If not, public emergency work (WPA, CCC, etc)?
23- Was this person ‘seeking work’?
24- If not seeking work, did he ‘have a job’, business, etc.?
25- Indicate if engaged in home housework (H), in school (S), Unable to work (U), or other (Ot)
E- code
26- Number of hours worked during week of March 24-30, 1940
27- Duration of unemployment up to March 30, 1940 – in weeks
28- Occupation for persons 14 years old and older
29- Industry
30- Class of worker (PW= previous work experience)
F- code
32- Number of weeks worked in 1939
33- Did this person receive income of $50 or more from other than monthly wages or salary?
34- Number of Farm Schedule
Line No.

And here's a summary of the process to get the info:

1940 Census Records – released in April 2012 (72 years later)
"There's a little bit more excitement this time because it is being released online and it's immediately available to people," says Rebecca Warlow, 1940 Census project manager at the Archives. "Anybody with Internet access can sit with their PC and desktops and search to their heart's content. … Previous Censuses were released on microfilms."
Here are step-by-step instructions on how to find records in the census:
• To start, you’ll need to know the address or approximate address of where the person or people were living by April 1, 1940.
• Using the address, you can then identify the enumeration district, a two-part number separated by a hyphen.
Steve Morse’s website at http://bit.ly/Hwtb2G can be used to compute the enumeration district (ED) and access the census records directly.
You can also go to the U.S. National Archives website and follow the instructions there: http://1.usa.gov/HB9Kt7
• Once you have the enumeration district, you are ready to browse the census records.
• The records will be available officially at http://1940census.archives.gov

 

Dave, I also got an email from ancestry.com that subscribers can now search via the 1940 census...using their family tree maker software and lineage, etc.

 

Thanks for researching this, Dave. I found the site to be very slow and not very user friendly (typical government bs). I've bookmarked it and will give it a few days to hopefully improve.

 

I know that it is exciting that the 1940 census has been released, but I don't think it is going to be very useful yet until it is indexed and then you will be able to search by name.

I have looked at pages from a specific enumeration district of family members, and converted the 1930 E.D. to 1940 E.D. but there are 3 possible E.D.'s for the 1940 census. I couldn't seem to get the conversion to work to give me a 1940 E.D. for a specific address.

And, each of those E.D.'s have about 30 pages. I don't feel like looking through 90 pages to find a specific address!

I have been doing a lot of genealogy lately and have been working with someone else on ancestry.com and we have been helping each other a lot! The person I have been communicating with lives in Utah and often goes to the Family History Library run by the Church of Latter Day Saints. I think that he is a member of that church. He documents everything in his family tree as much as possible with census records, birth certificates, death certificates, records from other countries, etc. We have both gotten kind of side-tracked and the people we are researching are not even close ancestors, but are on the "side chains."

I am actually thinking of helping to index the 1940 census.

 

Sue, at first it seems like it will take a really long time to sort through. When I started off I had 25 EDs to pick from but after checking the More Details on the Morris site I narrowed it down to two EDs. "If" there's not much traffic at the site you can zip through the pages fairly quick. I was able to locate my first relative on image 14 of 24 at the first ED so I didn't need to go to next ED at all. On the next relative I got lucky and pinned down the right ED quickly, and found the house on image 15 of 28. The 3rd location was even quicker as it was in the same Ward, ie same ED and on image 19, just four later.

So yes I looked at least 33 pages but the real key is how fast they load.

 

Having a lot of intermarriage of cousins, etc, in your family makes the searching easier for you, Dave

 

Since we are both from PA maybe we are related.