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Follow-Along: How to Use the 1950 U.S. Census Infographic

11/5/2021

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STEP #1: "START HERE"

PictureInfographic by BFM Research
Last week, I created a chart to jumpstart your search for ancestors when the 1950 U.S. population census becomes public on April 1, 2022. This week's post will help you find the information you need to move off the starting square.  

Based on what we saw after the 1940 census was released by the National Records Administration (NARA), it will likely take several months for indexes and searchable databases to be created and made available. Until then, you will only be able to see the original microfilmed images on sites such as Ancestry, Fold3.com, and FamilySearch, with no way to type a person's name into a search box to get to the right census page. Without knowing where your ancestor lived, that daunting task will be like sitting next to a stack of forms that reach to the ceiling, and the only way to find your guy/gal is to flip through the pile, page by page. 

This project won't feel like looking for a needle in a haystack if you know where your ancestor lived in April 1950. The strategies in this blog series will cover how the census is organized at the NARA and follow its research guidelines with the information you do know. I will be honest here...some of you may hit pay dirt in a relatively short time, while others may still hit roadblocks. I have heard from several of you who have no idea where your ancestor was in 1950 and are already frustrated by FOMO. My advice? If you work through this chart and get truly stuck, please resist the fear that you, too, will miss out on the magic of discovery! Patience will pay off if you decide to wait for the indexes...and I will be here to help you navigate those next Spring.

Even if you DO decide to wait for the "click-and-search" option later in 2022, I encourage you to follow along with this tutorial. You will still benefit from learning about how the census data was organized and how to navigate its framework. This knowledge will give you a helping hand when you work with other censuses, from way back in 1790 and into the future. 

​Are you ready to play my version of Chutes-and-Ladders with the infographic? Just put your game piece on "Start Here" and answer the question in the red box to choose the best research path.  Good luck!!


QUESTION: Do you know the town where your ancestor lived in 1950?

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ASK LIVING PEOPLE
If you do not know the town where your ancestor lived in 1950, find someone to ask! In my case, I hadn't been born yet, so I'm no help to even my own family. My brothers were alive, though, so I had my answer faster than it took to order a malted milkshake at the Woolworth's counter. But what if you don't have a sibling on speed-dial? Reach out to other family members or old family friends. Emailing or making an old-school phone call is great. You can even wait until your next family gathering and write your notes on a table napkin if you have to. ​

PicturePhoto by Quino Al
 A more high tech approach is to take advantage of social networking. Sites like Facebook can help you find extended family members and their old neighbors too. Send a private message and politely explain what you are looking for and why. If you do, please be mindful of any personal or identifying details you learn about living people. Their info has to stay private (and not be broadcasted back on social media).

PicturePhoto by Lena De Fanti
DIG OUT HOME SOURCES
Opening up a drawer or box of family stuff can be like finding buried treasure. Who knows what was collected and passed down! The usual suspects are birth, death, and marriage certificates. But school yearbooks, photo albums, and scrapbooks can also tell you the town where your family may have been about 1950. My grandmother kept every Christmas card ever sent to her, plus a few of the original envelopes. My parents had the addressed letters they sent back and forth when my dad was abroad. A dated newspaper clipping about my brother's school concert even got me to the right neighborhood! And when you've finished fall-cleaning your office and attic, go back to those living people above and ask them if they have any memento boxes hanging around that might have some clues for you. 

GO BACK TO THE 1940 CENSUS
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Your family may have lived in the same place as they did in 1940, of course. Lucky for you, the 1940 census has been digitized, indexed, and is accessible in online databases. NARA, Ancestry, and FamilySearch will have whatever is available for April 1940. ​If you find your ancestor there, and are pretty confident they did not move by 1950, use that town for the next step.

(Asking again) 
​QUESTION: Do you know the town where your ancestor lived in 1950?

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Now that you know your ancestor's hometown in 1950, and you are ready to move on to Step #2! Join me next time, when we will work on pinning down his or her street address...


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The 1950 U.S. census is coming!

10/27/2021

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April 1, 2022 will be a huge day in genealogy-land! That is the date that images of the 1950 U.S. population census will be released to the public. (This follows the law that a census cannot be made publicly available until 72 years after the official census day.)

The good news is that you will see images of the actual census pages that the enumerators filled out. The not-as-good news is that they will not be searchable by an ancestor's name until sites like Ancestry.com, Fold3.com,  or Family Search create indexes and databases for you. And that will take several months of many people working many hours to get that done. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) may use handwriting recognition technology to provide a name index soon after. Still, you can imagine that it won't be particularly accurate. (I mean, I can't even read my OWN handwriting sometimes, so...)

You can wait impatiently for months until a searchable database becomes available, or you can do some homework and get the job done much more quickly. The key is knowing the street address of where your ancestor lived that fateful day in 1950. Identify the correct enumeration district (ED), and you will be ready to browse the images and track him down in no time (sort of). My infographic above follows the research process by asking you a few questions and setting you up for success when the clock strikes midnight on March 31!

PINPOINT WHERE YOUR ANCESTOR LIVED IN 1950
A street address for a city-dwelling ancestor is like gold here. If he/she lived in the country, then a township or subdivision of a rural area will work. But if you don't know where their residence was, there are ways to figure it out. If you are super lucky, someone in your family might know. Or poke around in the family records you already have for some clues. Hint: if you know where they were on the 1940 census, try following their path with city and phone directories. 

If the street still exists, you can find it with online mapping tools like Google Maps. If the street is gone or was renamed, seek out historical maps from earlier in the 20th century. Either way, familiarize yourself with main streets and landmarks in the neighborhood because one of those will likely be a boundary line of an ED. ​

IDENTIFY THE CENSUS ENUMERATION DISTRICT (ED) FOR YOUR ANCESTOR'S RESIDENCE
The purist's way of determining the ED for your ancestor is to find his location on the original Census Bureau's maps. The National Archives Catalog has digital images of the 1950 census ED maps in the record series, "Enumeration District and Related Maps, 1880–1990." In addition to the political jurisdictions (county, city, township), the maps show roads, waterways, and large properties like cemeteries and parks. City maps often label ward boundaries and other types of subdivisions. The ED numbers are written in orange and have two parts: 2-digit prefix for county and 2-digit suffix for a specific area in that county.

Do you prefer the click-and-go method?  I can still hear my math teacher lecturing me, "You need to know how to calculate the answer yourself before I let you use a calculator!" The value of that wasn't lost on me, particularly when my solar calculator ran out of power during a test. And I did just give you the tools to determine your ancestor's ED by hand. But lucky for you, tech wizard Steve Morse created the One-Step-Webpages site where the magic can happen much more quickly. On his Unified Census ED Finder page, you can type in as much information you know about your ancestor's location, and the ED will be spit out for you.

So, get all your ancestors' 1950 data pulled together now, and you will be ready to roll when the 1950 census is made available to the public. Happy hunting!

Additional sources:
1950 US census research guide on FamilySearch
How to research census records with the NARA website 
NARA's 1950 census blog
1950 US Census Bureau History
NARA blog about online public access to its records
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National Archives - "Founders Online" Database of Historical Documents

7/20/2017

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The Records

The National Archives has partnered with the University of Virginia to make historical documents of the Founders of the United States of America free and available online. On the website Founders Online, you can search through thousands of digitized records from George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The site is continually being added to and will include over 178,000 documents relating to America's Founding Era when it is completed.

To get started, there is a FAQ page "How to Use This Site" for tips on how to find, access, and research documents in the collection. Whether researching a person, time period, or a concept (e.g. Bill of Rights), you can find specific suggestions and helpful information there. The collection can be searched in several ways: by author, recipient, time period, or keyword. The documents are fully searchable and annotated. 

The Case Study

As an example of how valuable this digital collection can be for genealogists, I will use a case where I was working on identifying the death date of a Revolutionary War patriot from New York. If you have ever worked with colonial era records, then you know it is often difficult (if not frustratingly impossible) to locate documents for an ancestor going back that far. Some states, and even towns within a state, were better than others at keeping track of vital records at that time. After exhausting town and church records search, the goal is to look next for other types of records that hold clues about that ancestor.

In the case of my patriot, I needed to track his family's whereabouts after the Revolutionary War ended. What little I knew about him was that he was born and had married in Connecticut, and moved to the small frontier town of Ballston, New York when it was first settled. During the Revolution, he was taken prisoner by raiding Tory soldiers and held in Canada until the fall of 1782, when the last of the Patriot prisoners were released and sailed for home. Unfortunately for me, he did not go straight back to his farm in Ballston, NY. After the raid where he was taken prisoner, it was apparent that his wife and children had not remained in the town. They had probably fled to be near extended family or former neighbors in a safer place, but where??

At that early stage in my research, locating that unknown community was like finding a needle in a haystack. The ancestor's first name was unique ("Tyrannus") but also frequently misspelled in records, so using name variations and wildcard characters in searches could take a very long time. Last name was common ("Collins"), which would also return too many records during index searches to be productive either.

When it comes to colonial research, as I have already mentioned, vital records can only be so helpful. Census records are the next go-to place, but the first U.S. census of householders are fraught with errors and omissions. Because the family didn't show up in the first 1790 U.S. federal census in either New York or Connecticut, I needed to strategize another way to get a handle on where they might have gone. The first stop was to look at early post-colonial era collections for general information that might pertain to the ancestor and his family. That is where the Founders Online collection came in.

It truly was as simple as typing the ancestor's name "Tyrannus Collins" in the keyword search bar. Of course, we all know about serendipity, which isn't always on a researcher's side. But when it is..."Eureka!" moments like this are priceless: I not only found the town where the patriot had gone right after the war, I also confirmed that his youngest child was born there and that they had left town afterwards. I have since identified much more about the patriot's personal story up until his death and I owe it to this simple affidavit for helping knock down a brick wall that has made other researchers give up. 
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Source: Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov. 2017
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Field Trip to the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass.)

3/25/2017

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​Today I visited the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts where Jim Moran, the AAS’s Director of Outreach, arranged with the local group History Camp-Boston for a special behind-the-scenes talk and tour. This incredible archive is the repository for all things printed in our country’s 50 states, ranging from 1640—1876. These dates directly correspond with the operation of the first printing press in Boston through the enactment of copyright laws by the Library of Congress. In 1876, 2 copies of any publication made in America were required to be sent to Washington; because the LOC had a stable and larger infrastructure for housing the materials, the AAS cut off the collection as of that year and turned its focus to acquisition. This strategy has made the AAS an archive of national scope that every researcher should include in his/her go-to repository list.
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About the AAS

​The AAS was founded in 1812 by Revolutionary War patriot and local printer Isaiah Thomas. During the colonial years, when he ran his own very successful business in Massachusetts, his passion was to collect samples of publications from printers throughout the colonies. He wanted to study and compare technology and materials, with the collateral result of amassing an important historical collection. This was the birth of the AAS as both a learned society and a major independent research library. 
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The Collection

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​The AAS library today houses the largest and most accessible collection of books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, music, and graphic arts material printed through 1876 in what is now the United States. Predating the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) and New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (NYG&BS), the AAS also holds manuscripts and a substantial collection of secondary texts, bibliographies, and digital resources and reference works related to all aspects of American history and culture before the twentieth century. Types of ephemera run the gamut from 1814 voter ballots from a single town to inserts that were tucked into boxes with new watches. Most impressive, however, is the scope and depth of the newspaper archive. 
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Access the Manuscripts

​The collection has been fully digitized up through 1820, with finding aids for the subsequent years. The entire digital collection can be accessed on site at the AAS. Remote (at-home) access is available for a small portion of the collection. Where AAS has partnered with outside vendors, such as GenealogyBank.com and Ancestry.com, the vendors only have a portion of the full collection in their databases.
 
If you are planning to research on site at the library, visit the AAS website for how to plan and what to expect. The library is closed-stack and non-circulating. Visitors fill out call slips for item retrieval and view the materials in the reading room. Non-flash photography is encouraged, with photocopying and digital imaging services also available. 
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Typesetter Trivia!

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​The metal letters used in hand setting a printing press were stored in a case of wooden drawers next to the printing press. This is Isaiah Thomas's actual LETTER CASE on display at the AAS, To be time efficient, and to be able to work quickly without looking, typesetters arranged the letter blocks in a specific order: the most frequently used letters were placed in the LETTER CASE where they could be reached easily. Specifically, the capital letters were stored in the UPPER CASE and the regular letters were stored in the LOWER CASE. (And now you know where those terms originated!)

American Antiquarian Society
Address:  185 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Massachusetts 01609
Tel.:  508-755-5221
Email:  [email protected]
Website:  www.americanantiquarian.org
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    Author

    Beth Finch McCarthy
    Professional Genealogist

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