I finally got a hit off the 1940 Census!

Anyone who’s tried to look up their relatives from the just-released 1940 Census knows it hasn’t been indexed and the only hope you have of finding anyone is knowing their exact address. So after hours of combing through the records I discovered that one set of grandparents weren’t living at the address we had for them either in 1937 or 1942, the other set of grandparents apparently wasn’t even living in the town we thought they were in, and my father was lost somewhere between California and Illinois.

But I did finally track down my mother, who at the time was a 23-year old nursing student in Alton, Illinois. And she, like all her fellow nursing students, had worked 56 hours the previous week.

They made nurses tough back then!:slight_smile:

Good for you! I found my dad in Glenview, my husband in Chicago, and my mom in a small town in Wisconsin. I don’t have addresses for a lot of other relatives,vso I may wait for the name indexes.

Lots of information, isn’t there? I have a feeling they’ll never ask questions like that again.

It was the year before my mom was born, and the address she thought the family lived at was not accurate, as the house was at that point a boarding house, apparently, owned by an Italian gentleman and housing 6 other men of varying ages and races.

I’m going to have to do some research to figure out where my family was. I cannot wait until the thing gets indexed. Does anyone know if there’s an ETA on that?

I found all four of my grandparents, and (by accident) two of my great-grandparents! I can’t believe they asked for salary information!

One of my relatives was randomly selected for the supplementary questions, luckily she was the one I knew next to nothing about. I now know her dad was from not just Ireland, but Northern Ireland, thanks to the request to be specific. Still can’t find my grandfather, they had moved in the mean time.

I also found a whole section of people occupied as teachers - a note made it clear that they were all nuns. :slight_smile:
Sometimes the stuff not even connected to me is the most interesting.

My Dad’s family were all in the same small town in Massachusettes, so they were pretty easy to find, even though I didn’t have their address.

My Mom’s family is from Queens, so I didn’t even try them. I think someone said there was some sort of volunteer effort to digitize the names, so perhaps I’ll try them if that ever materializes.

I found my mother! Her father was at a tuberculosis sanatorium at the time, and she and her mother and brother were living with her maternal grandparents… along with two aunts and a great-grandmother. Eight people in a three bedroom row house!

My great-grandfather was a night watchman at a local factory (and had a good income compared to his neighbors). The two aunts, my great aunts, worked as a stenographer and a “soda dispenser” at a drug store. My grandmother is listed as a rug weaver! I knew she was a seamstress later on, but I’d never heard about this part. It’s listed as some sort of emergency employment, and an “art project”. Must call Mom.

If you find out, can you let us know how rug weaver its emergency employment? I’m curious.

If my mom remembers anything (she was quite small in 1940) I will be sure to come back and share it here. But I can already share what the census form says about “emergency employment”. The column before asks: “Was this person AT WORK for pay or profit in private or nonemergency Govt. work during week of March 24-30? (Yes or No)” If the answer was No, the next column asked: “If not, was he at work, or assigned to, public EMERGENCY WORK (WPA, NYA, CCC, etc.) during week of March 24/30? (Yes or No)”

So my grandmother, according to the census, was weaving rugs for one of the New Deal agencies. Perhaps she was making rugs for public buildings under the WPA?

I just found out that Oregon is one of just a few states that are going to index the state census for 1940. Since my family goes back to the 1880s in Oregon, this is great news.

My great-grandfather was listed as employed by the W.P.A. Remember, 1940 was still pre-WW2, so was the tail end of the Great Depression. At the time though, people didn’t know it was almost over.

I found my father, uncle, grandfather, grandmother on my father’s side, but the census data told me absolutely nothing I didn’t know already. I haven’t yet checked my mother’s family, who lived a few blocks away in 1940.

The only puzzling thing was the home value number. How did they arrive at that? Did the census takers ask this question, or did they access the tax rolls?

Of course, the dollar wasn’t worth the same as today, but the relative values in the neighborhood seem way off. My grandfather’s house was on a double lot, a custom, brick, luxury home (for the day), but is given a value of 1/4 of ones immediately adjacent which were comparatively simple, straightforward, modest frame homes on single lots.

Found two of four grandparents - they were still young enough to be living with my great-grandparents. #3 should have been found and #4 lived in a really populated area that I’ll probably want someone else to index.

They were poor based on average salary in 1939 (average was $1700ish - they made significantly less), but about average-ish for the people around them. And so far each record has led to some questions I should ask of the family members who are still alive.

Count yourselves lucky, they won’t release the census data here for a hundred years.

I decided to follow the directions after several hours of plodding.

The 1930 census had the household of my interest living a whole 'nuther part of town. (Niagara Falls, NY). So, that was no help when looking for them in 1940.

Fortunately, ancestry.com allows access to many city directories and I was able to see that the folks I sought had bought a house sometime in the '30s and lived there until as late as 1959 which is the last year I could view a directory for Niagara Falls.

Sure enough, I found them! The big bonus was that they had had a Son in 1931. (more searching)

Now, it being Sunday and all, there is not much to do so I thought I would look at where they lived and worked. According to ancestry.com, these folks, from sometime in the early 1930’s until 1959 owned their home lived at the same address: 602 101st St. (1959 is the most recent city directory they have for N.F.) According to the SS Death records, these folks still lived in the same zip code into the late '70s.

It’s fun to use Google Street View to see where the relatives lived and in some cases, the very houses. In the 1940 census, a metric butt-load of folks lived on 101st St. in Niagara Falls, NY. According to Google Earth, it is now a wasteland. I wondered what had happened to make a neighborhood vanish. I continued to poke around until Google came through.

Anyone here remember Love Canal? I grew up in the GTA and it dominated the news for what seemed like ages.

Mom was born in Buffalo and we traveled there often but I had no idea we had family who were affected. I didn’t even know where Love Canal was, apart from being somewhere in upstate New York.

Wow.

I found my father and my mother.

I thought my father would be easy, since he lived in a small town and I knew exactly which street. And it probably would have been if the microfilm hadn’t been scanned in upside down. :rolleyes:

My mother was easier, even though it was in Brooklyn. I knew the address and managed to find the Unified 1940 Census ED Finder. You can plug in an address and find out what enumeration district it was in. Narrows things down quickly.

I haven’t had luck with my wife’s side of the family, since she doesn’t know their address from back then.

I looked for my address since none of my family was living in the States in 1940. It was interesting because my house was inhabited by a widower and a single lodger. The house to my left had 8 people living in it and one of the houses to my right had something like ten people living in it. :eek:

It seems like a lot to me just because these houses at the time were three bedrooms and one bath with no basement. They are approximately 1500 sq ft., and aren’t all that well laid out in terms of space. It feels super tight when my parents visit and we have five people in here, I can’t imagine ten people and only one bathroom.

It never occurred to me to check because I know very little about my family beyond my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather but for shits and giggles I looked up my paternal grandmother’s family. It helps that her mother’s name is Olive and they lived in a small town with only 4 or 5 other Olives. I didn’t know the names of anyone else in the family though and I wasn’t certain when they moved to that town or even what their last name was (though I ended up being correct).

As it turns out:

  1. You don’t have to have legible handwriting to be a census taker.
  2. My grandmother was 1 year old (I assumed she had been 1 or 2 based on my belief that she was 17 or 18 when my father was born).
  3. While the small town had many Idas and Agneses and Helgas and even a Hedwig, it appears that my grandmother was the only Sandra.
  4. If you have 4 links to choose from and you start with the link with the smallest number of pages, the person you’re looking for will be in the last link on close to the last page (out of 122 pages, the family was on the 116th page I looked at).
  5. My great-grandfather’s name was George and he was an electrician railway worker. My great-grandmother didn’t work. The oldest of their 6 children was 15 and the youngest was 1. The first three were boys and the second three were girls. Each parent had a child named after them. In 1935 all but the two youngest were living in the big city next to the small town but my youngest great-aunt was born the year they moved to the small town.
  6. They house they owned was the same house I knew about and was worth $2000.

That was interesting. I know my great grandfather’s name. I think I now know about 50% more about my father’s family than I knew an hour ago. That’s pretty sad.

#4 was found and had some clues that led to me finding them in previous censuses.
#3 is still unfound, which is still surprising me, because they should have been the easy-to-find branch of the family.

So now that indexing is done for a lot of states, I finally found them all. Then I found two of them again because they were double counted.