Posted on 03/19/2012 5:28:04 PM PDT by smokingfrog
The federal government plans to release intimate details about 132 million people in the United States who participated in the 1940 census when it makes the data available to the public on April 2 for the first time after 72 years of being kept confidential.
Access to the records will be free and open to anyone on the Internet — but they will not be immediately name searchable.
For genealogists and family historians, the 1940 census release is the most important disclosure of ancestral secrets in a decade and could shake the branches of many family trees. Scholars expect the records to help draw a more pointillistic portrait of a transformative decade in American life.
(Excerpt) Read more at tampabay.com ...
... finding a name in the 3.8 million digitized images won’t be as easy as a Google search: It could be at least six months after the release before a nationwide name index is created.
You might find this of interest...
It would be interesting to look up some of my relatives when the database by name becomes available.
I have been trying to find a way to look up the 1930 and prior censae without going through ancestry.com. Does the census agency have a direct portal?
Until the name search is available, it will be very difficult for most people.
geneology ping....
ancestry.com is theft.
Who’s doing the name indexing, and anyone know if there’s a way to volunteer help?
Genealogy ping
bump
I’ve found tons of family info just by inserting name, DOB, and state of birth into my search engine. I use Ancestry as a home base for my tree. I do find lots of info on Ancestry even though I’ve yet to pay for a membership. You can find tidbits in various ways on Ancestry and after a while it all comes together.
Thanks for the link!
Thanks for that link!
Check your local library to see if they have an account. My wife uses ancestry.com at the library for free all the time.
I belong to Ancestry also and what you can find there is hard to find other places, so it’s my “guilty pleasure”. I pay every three months so in case I decide to quit, I won’t have so much invested.
For free resources, I have found http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ invaluable. I use the “Family Tree” search quite often and anyone can use it, but always verify info as in all net searches due to conflicting info in the “trees”.
Genealogy is so addictive!...but I’ve been quite pleased to find on both sides of my family that we arrived in this country quite early...mid-1600’s....part of that Scot-Irish/English that populated the south.
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