What exactly is the deal with the 1940 U.S. census on Ancestry.com?

Question

I tried searching for my great-grandparents based on their birth years and state of residence and all I find are "1940s era search results." How long will it be before I can use the census to do genealogy research?

Answer 1

Ancestry.com picked up the 1940 census images (on a BIG hard drive) at 12:01 am this morning, April 2nd, and then immediately started to load the images, "on the fly" onto their servers. All images should be up within a week.



The 1940 images were made public today after a 72 year mandated confidentiality period. The NARA site, which is experienced unexpected user pressure (over 22 million hits by 10 am today although the website expected a maximum of 10 million per day) opened up those images to the public today as well.



FamilySearch will also put the 1940 images on their website, and will some other companies.



Thus it's not clear what your question is. Name indexes could not start until the 1940 census became public, and a full name index is going to take from 6 months to ??? to complete by the various parties. If you want to search the 1940 census now, you will need to search by location of your family translated into enumeration districts.



If you are not familiar with locational searches, use our tutorial on the matter for the 1940 census: http://www.stevemorse.org/census/quiz.php and use our unified tool to find the enumeration district number for a location in 1940: http://www.stevemorse.org/census/unified.html

Answer 2

Ancestry doe not have the 1940 census yet like they they have the earlier censuses with a searchable name index. The NARA is who released the census today and one can only browse it by Enumeration District. So you need to know the person's address then find the enumeration district the address is located then browse the pages looking at the names on each page to find who you are looking for. Ancestry got access to the census the same time as everyone else did. You can bet they are fast and furiously transcribing each page for a name search index like the others but it will take time. In the mean time it looks like they are amassing other "1940s" databases available under the 1940 census link on their page. I guess they will make available each state indexed as they have them completed.



NARA

http://1940census.archives.gov/

Answer 3

Although the National Archives released digitized images of census data 2 April 2012, it hasn't yet been indexed.



Ancestry.com has its army of off-shore indexers working at full speed and they have announced that when completed, they will make the results available for free at least until October 2012. No completion date given. In addition, three leading genealogy organizations, Archives.com, FamilySearch International, and findmypast.com, have collaborated on the 1940 US Census Project, which has hundreds of thousands of volunteer indexers across the country helping make the census searchable and available online for free. You can volunteer to help this worthwhile project at https://the1940census.com/

Answer 4

If you look closely at the ancestry.com page, the 1940 Census has been completed for American Somoa and some of the states.



But, you can also go to http://1940census.archives.gov

www.census.gov/1940census/

www.the1940census.com



The problem is that it will be months before these sites are name searchable.



In all fairness, the Government should not release these records yet. Why? Because 21,000,000 people are still alive. Not everyone wants their personal info on the web. (The first article printed in the newspaper claimed that there were 31,000,000 still alive. Either number would include my sister and all my brothers except one.)

Answer 5

Information about individual responses must remain confidential for 72 years. So, you cannot find any census after 1940.

Answer 6

Ty