1940 Census Poster and PSA/Promo/Infomercial thingy

[pikkewyntjie.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm one of those who has been perusing the newly released 1940 Census. I have tracked down some of my ancestors, most of whom lived in various parts of Kansas in 1940. 

Tag line: "You cannot know your country unless your country knows you."
Why does that creep me out?

Edited to add poster. 

Comments

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I downloaded Stratford, Connecticut. I guess I have to scan every record because it isn't alphabetized yet?

[noluck-boston.livejournal.com]

This post on Gawker helped me out. I live in Boston. so it was quite daunting.
http://gawker.com/5898790/how-to-find-cool-stuff-in-the-newly+released-1940-census-data-or-cyberstalking-your-grandparents

[pikkewyntjie.livejournal.com]

If you can't figure out the Enumeration District your ancestors lived in, you're pretty much SOL. Fortunately for me, both of my grandparents on my father's side were living in the same podunk town at the time and were only a few pages apart. I also found my great-great grandfather and my great aunt's future husband without even really trying. I can't imagine trying to hunt down people in a large urban area without at least a street address.

I'm trying to do my part and help index these. I have mixed feelings about doing it because of the way a certain religious group tends to, at least in my opinion, abuse the information. On the other hand, someone somewhere will eventually tag all these things sooner or later. I figure most people do genealogical research for reasons other than religious reasons and they're the ones I want to help.

[Edited to remove language that I realized sounded pretty intolerant. My apologies to anyone who saw that.]

[noluck-boston.livejournal.com]

I understand what you mean. It took me 3 hours to track down my grandparents, and I knew there address!

To others on this forum, don't give up. its well worth the wait.

I wanted to find out who was living in the home i live in now. Being a Librarian, i had already done some research and found out the street has three different names over the years. So keep that in mind.

[pikkewyntjie.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, that's a good point about the streets! For example, nearly every major city has a Martin Luther King Blvd. now. Or, another example, as the guy in Back to the Future put it, "Who the hell is John F. Kennedy?"

[deborahkla.livejournal.com]

"...the busy but unspectacular census..."

How can I not love a statement like that?

[noluck-boston.livejournal.com]

Its amazing the things you can find out from the census. I knew my grandfather quite well, he told me a lot of stories. However he never told anyone about the mystery 10 year old girl who was living with his family in 1940. She even has a different last name.

Soon we will all be able to know everything about all our family's as more and more of these type of records are available.

[pikkewyntjie.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. These records can reveal a lot, but they also leave a lot open for questions. Maybe she was a foster child?

Doing ancestry research certainly has it's darker side (and I definitely am NOT trying to make a pun here!) On my family's Southern side, the 1860 census shows that one of my ancestors had 2 slaves: a 19-year-old black woman and her 2-year-old "mulatto" daughter. Of course, this information came from a separate list just for slaves and no names were on it. On the 1870 census, it showed that a 29-year-old black woman and her 12-year-old mulatto daughter were living in the home and now I could see that the mother's name was Martha and the daughter's name was Louisa. Their occupation was listed as "farm laborer" and the mother had had two more children, both of them black.

I wasn't crazy to find out my ancestors were slaveholders, but it is what it is, and just that one census record tells so much. Even though Martha was free, she didn't have many options at that time so she stayed on with the family. I strongly suspect Louisa was fathered by her owners, which would make her a distant blood relative to me, but Martha probably chose the lover who was the father of her other children. At least I hope that's how it was.

Unfortunately, I could not find any of them in the 1880 census. They were no longer living with the white family and I can only hope they moved on to better things. But maybe not.