You can try Ancestor Hunters mailing list. They will help with looks ups as well, though it seems you already have a subscription.
I looked last night and I think I have 15 ancestors who were alive for the 1940 census. I’ll probably have to find 5-6 records all together. A couple of them will be pretty easy to find I think, the others might take some work.
Well it’s out, but the Archives site is slow, I haven’t gotten it to load a page yet. Ancestry has some, but not many images. If Family Search has them I have not been able to find them. I thought that they would all be the same images, but Ancestry suggests that they are making the images themselves.
I had thought today was the day they made the records public- that they were basically buying the already digitized records from the Census. Apparently they’re still digitizing the damned things.
I wonder what safeguards are in place to prevent another records disaster like the burning of the 1921 fire that destroyed the 1890 Census or the 1973 NARA fire. You would think that with today’s digitization technology all of the hard copy Census records would all be uploaded and backed up and duplicated on lots of different hard drives all over the country, but I’ll bet you’d be wrong.
I tried it 3 days ago. Too slow to be useful but the next morning it was working okay.
Fortunately, almost all our close relatives were still living in the same places at the time we came along later, so addresses and such are no problem.
But sheesh. Forget not having a name index. The maps and other info they have to track things down are horrible. For instance, the census maps are color coded, orange lines denote enumeration districts, etc. But the maps are scanned in gray scale. Ack!
The map of the area where my parents/grandparents were looks like it was done by someone guessing where roads might be and had never seen the area. And the map of Mrs. FtG’s hometown they have corresponds to nothing like the actual map of the place. Went thru the wrong enumeration district completely on the first try.
But anyway. I have both my parents (and their parents) and one set of Mrs. FtG’s family. (The other were sort of dispersed at the time.)
For more distant folk, I think I’m going to try to get census location info from the earlier censuses and try those.
I now have 5 straight censuses where Mrs. FtG’s grandmother’s name is spelled the same way. And in this one the grandmother has the circle-x next to her name which means she supplied the information. Maybe I’ll finally be believed when I say that she’s been spelling it wrong all along.
Well, my husband is from Chicago, and I couldn’t find the ward or the ED on the maps they gave, so he will have to wait fora name index.
My dad, however, is from one of the suburbs, and I was able to figure out the ED. There were only 56 pages, so I scrolled through them and really enjoyed it. My grandparents and aunts and uncle were there, but in the pages I found quite a few great-aunts and uncles, second cousins, cousins once or twice removed, and aunts and uncles-to-be. I saw people I never would have thought of looking for.
So one good thing for me today!
I’m trying to find my paternal grandmother (she and my grandfather were separated and no mention of her is made on my grandfather’s entry) and also her parents, who I don’t know if she was living with them or not. Her parents lived in a small town in Alabama and I’ve found the town but can’t find them. Will have to wait for the index.
I’ve found my mother’s immediate family. I’m looking for her paternal grandparents; they lived on a farm in Middle-of-Nowhere, Alabama but their census taker had a large sparsely populated geographic area with seemingly thousands of residents.
I wish they’d let people help them by entering the results they find into the index. (They can always change them later, but meanwhile an index with errors is better than no index.)
I do too! I’d happily index the 56 pages of parts of Northfield Township, but I don’t think they let you choose if you volunteer. I think both ancestry and family search are looking for volunteer indexers, but I don’t think you get to choose.
Ancestry, as of last night, has a name index complete for Nevada and Delaware. Progress.
Well, I found my mom’s parents after a bit of librarian detective work (seems Sidney St. is a fuck of a long street in Pittsburgh, but I knew they lived behind St. Joseph’s Hospital which is no longer there but, etc. etc.) and just had to skim through about 20 pages, my browser crashing maybe six or seven times, but there’s no telling with my dad’s folks.
If there had been one fewer neighbor, though, my great grandmother would have been one of the two on each page to get the extra questions.
I really have to pity the indexers. Many census images seem almost illegible to me.
One person born in “Missouri” was indexed as “Wisconsin.” When I looked at census image I was amazed to see that the “Missouri” could easily be mistaken as “Wisconsin.” :smack:
I suspect there are many mysteries which should be solvable that are hidden from us by bad handwriting, bad transcriptions, and, in some cases, by pollee lies. (Though lies can cut both ways. One ancestral surname showed up for me because a young woman gave the census-taker her maiden name even though census was taken a few months after her marriage. Marital spat?)
I found my husband in Chicago. I used the ED from 1930 to find the ED in 1940. That ED had three different groups,Bo’s I took them in order. Of course he was in the third. The first two had large, clear handwriting - you know where I’m going with this, don’t you?
Anyway, he was right where he said he would be. He squeaked into the 1940 census so it was nice to see his name.
I did notice on ancestry that whoever put the images online seemed to change viewers here and there. 90% of the images had the page forward in the upper right corner, but the other 10% were different and had it in the middle. I had to scroll through 75 pages or so to get to my husband and his family, and it threw me off my rhythm. I will take it over loading microfilm and cranking that machine anytime, however.
An interesting thing about income:
It’s only for people who drew wages. The income for my grandfather and great-grandparents who were farmers, all of whom owned their own farms, is not given; the income of farm laborers on the farms they owned and on other farms is given, including family members (e.g. my great-grandparents had a 17 year old grandson whose income for working on their farm is given as $120), but the farmowners income isn’t given.
My grandfather who was a construction foreman earned $2,940. His house, a bungalow that is still standing, that was probably smack-dab-middle-class when he built it and that today would not be the nicest or the worst house in any 1920s section of town, was appraised at an appalling $800; I figure that it’s because the Depression was ending and he lived in a tiny town, but I’ve seen houses no nicer than that appraised for more than that in 1910.
I saw one person, a black man, listed as farm laborer whose income was listed as $1,800. I figure he must have been basically a farm manager of a large farm (who, because he was black, couldn’t be called an actual manager) because that’s several times the usual for the farm laborers I saw (most of whom were in the $200-$400 range. Teachers I’ve seen ranged from $900 per year to $1600 per year; schoolbus drivers earned about $1,000 per year. (In rural Alabama at that time the white schools went about 7-8 months per year [they let out for a month at harvest, a month at planting, and then part of the summer and a longer-than-now Christmas-New Years break]; black schools went about 5 months per year.)
Something I’ve seen several times in “Highest grade of school completed” was H1. I’ve also seen H2 and H3. Does anybody know what this means? (Usually it just gives a number- my grandfathers, for example, were 7 and 9 for highest grade completed, which I’d assume meant 7th and 9th grades; they were born in 1892 and 1893 respectively so that was about average for the white working classes of rural Alabama; you rarely see higher than 6 for blacks for the simple reason that few counties even had a black high school.)
I asked my mom about that - she was pretty sure H1 meant 9th grade, H2 10th, etc. One of my great uncles was listed as H4 and she knew he graduated high school, but did not attend college. Another was listed as H2 and was 15 years old at the time.
Thanks to the National Archives, I was able to locate the ward in which my mom’s family resided in Minneapolis. I drive past the house she grew up in at least twice a week, have heard stories about the neighbor kids, it’s neat to flesh out some of her stories (The dad that was never around next door? He was a policeman for the railroad). I did have to break it to her that her aunt and uncle did not live two doors down “forever” as she thought.
I still can’t find my dad’s family. Legend was that he was born in Iowa. Or in Platteville, WI. Or Eau Claire, WI. Or LaCrosse, WI. Ugh.
Well, I am happy to report that I have located both my mother and father’s families on the 1940 census. Granted that it was after several long searches but my mother’s family was actually easy to find because they were in Delaware in Wilmington and I knew their address. Now a mystery surrounds what happened to their landlords, my grandmother’s aunt and uncle–they rented an apartment in the house from them, but neither are listed as resident at the house. Strange. 
My Dad’s family was a bit harder to locate, because I was looking at the wrong address! My grandfather had a job during the depression (as did my other grandfather, so both families were fortunate in that), he worked at a dairy, and they lived at the farm. My dad had told me that they moved into town in 1939, so I was looking in town. But lo and behold, they were still on the farm when the census was taken in April of 1940. It is much harder to find people in the countryside, btw, unless you have some idea of what the address was. I was able to figure out what enumeration district they were in, and narrowed it down a bit, and finally found them!
I also found my partner’s grandparents; his mother was in college at the time but his aunt and uncle were still in high school and were listed, as were a couple of their cousins who lived with them. I don’t think any of that generation is still alive, unfortunately, and it’s only he and his sister of their generation still living. He was very glad to see his grandparents and his mother and other relatives on the census, though.
This was all done off the archives.gov website, btw. The Delaware census, at least for Wilmington, was indexed, at least the incorporated part of Wilmington. I have some other family I’m still looking for. It’s very hard to find out what the enumeration districts were when the listings are: “east of B&O railroad…” i.e., things that just aren’t there any longer!
Good luck to others who are searching!