Genealogists must research before they can search the 1940 US Census
By Judy Everett Ramos, Fort Worth Genealogy Examiner
The genealogy world is buzzing with anticipation of the April 2 release of the 1940 US Census. At 8:00 a.m. CDT, an archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC will press a button and release this census for public viewing for the first time ever.
The US Constitution requires a decennial census to be a population count. Congress later instituted a “72-Year Rule” not to release a census for 72 years after it is conducted, in order to preserve individual privacy.
When the 1940 US Census is released April 2 it will not be indexed. So while it will be free and completely accessible by people on their home computers or at public libraries, if people do not know where their ancestors lived when the census was taken they will waste their time poring through volumes of raw data. It may take a year for volunteers to index the more than 18 terabytes of online information.
However, Meg Hacker, director of the National Archives Southwest Region in Fort Worth, recommends ways to find the Enumeration District (ED) of their ancestor. An ED is the geographic area assigned to an enumerator, or census taker. Generally, it was the amount of ground the census taker could cover in two weeks if it was a city or one month if the area was rural.
Some of this pre-research will need to be done offline, the old fashion way.
“For people who have been researching their ancestry for a long time, manual research is no big deal,” Hacker said. “But if someone only recently began and they only know how to search for documents online, manual research may be a foreign concept.”
Hacker recommends using some of the following methods to find out which ED an ancestor was living in when the census was taken on or around April 1, 1940:
Address books
Birth/death/marriage certificates
City directories and telephone directories
Diaries
Employment records
Local newspapers
Letters, envelopes, and other correspondence
Naturalization records
Photographs
Relatives
School and church records
Scrapbooks
Social Security application (SS program began in mid-1930s)
WWII draft registration
Look for the ED number in the top right corner of the 1930 US Census. If the ancestor was still living there for the 1940 Census, the genealogist has hit the jackpot.
There are some online resources to help a genealogist find their ED. One is the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) 1940 Census Records page, which has a census countdown clock.
Hacker also recommends subscribing to NARA blog posts, following the 1940 Census on Twitter using the hastag #1940, and “liking” the National Archives and National Archives at Fort Worth on Facebook.
Steve Morse has an extensive website site that has many online tools. It can be difficult to know which tool is best to use. There is an overview page that explains the tools available on his site. One tool is “How to Access the 1940 Census in One Step” that can be valuable if someone already knows the ED. However, there is also another tool that is a series of questions that a genealogist can answer that may lead them to the ED, and when in doubt, genealogists should take this short quiz. There is also the Unified ED Finder where a genealogist may enter as much as they know about where their ancestor lived in 1940.
The whole process can be daunting, so Hacker recommends signing up for the local, free, one-hour appointments with NARA to help find the ED. Email ftworth.education@nara.gov to reserve a personal “1 on 1” session. The NARA’s address is 2600 West 7th Street, Suite 162, 817-831-5620.
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