Patience, grasshopper… patience!!
No, it isn’t fully indexed.
No, it isn’t searchable in every field.
No, the descriptions of the enumeration districts aren’t down to the street level in every case.1
Yes, it’s often necessary to review the entries line by line page by page.
Yes, it’s often necessary to do that in more than one enumeration district to find the people we’re looking for.
And no, even when we do everything we can think of, we’re not going to be able to find everybody we want to find right this minute in the online images of the 1950 census.
The Legal Genealogist‘s old-fart response to all of the above?
Kwitcherbitchin.
Just stop complaining.
Seriously.
The census release was less than four days ago.2 And let’s see here:
• The National Archives’ 1950 website has been up, fully accessible, and stable since it launched. That was not something we could have said 10 years ago when the 1940 census was launched.
• The NARA website has a rudimentary name index created by machine — something that did not exist when the 1940 census was released.
• The NARA index works reasonably well in some cases, particularly where census entries were printed. Where it’s off, or an entry wasn’t indexed, any user can help improve the index by corrections.
• All of the other major data sites — including Ancestry, FamilySearch, and MyHeritage — have all of the 1950 census images accessible online already.3 We couldn’t say that in 2012, when the 1940 census was available either.
• Indexing on other sites is underway, Indexing didn’t start nearly this early 10 years ago.
• The start point for indexing this time, particularly with the collaboration between Ancestry and FamilySearch through the 1950 US Census Community Project,4 is a machine index — which means it’ll be a lot faster to complete, since indexers will only need to correct entries that are wrong, not index every single letter and word on every entry.
In short, the whole release this time around is soooooooooo much better than it was a decade ago.
What’s lacking isn’t in the census release.
What’s lacking is in us.
We need to have some patience here.
What we’re getting is better, faster, and more useful in every respect than it was 10 years ago.
But we appear to have forgotten just what it was like 10 years ago.
Or — gasp — 10 years before that when getting it online would have seemed like a miracle.
So… deep breath time, okay?
All the things we want from the census, including every-field searching, will be available.
Just not yet.
Bottom line here: patience, grasshopper. Patience.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Kwitcherbitchin,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 4 Apr 2022).
SOURCES
- Those down-to-the-street-level descriptions may well be available on Steve Morse’s One-Step Pages, however. Use the Streets in the ED option once a range of enumeration districts has been identified in the Unified 1950 Census ED Finder. ↩
- See “Public Can Access Census Records 72 Years After Each Decennial Census,” posted 1 April 2022, U.S. Census Bureau (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/ : accessed 4 Apr 2022). ↩
- Go ahead. Check it out. ↩
- For more information, see “1950 U.S. Census Community Project,” FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ : accessed 4 Apr 2022). ↩
Boy, are you right on the money! Aren’t we family history detectives? Use city directories, other documents to id adresses. Use the Ancestry ED finder which includes street and house numbers. Use the crummy OCR name index. Use combinations of approaches.
I completely agree with you! I worked across the street from the National Archives for decades, and I remember when you had to sign up for one-hour time slots in the microfilm room to be able to crank through rolls of microfilm. The earlier censuses weren’t online, and they weren’t immediately indexed (remember soundex?). Genealogists have gotten so spoiled, expecting everything to be online and everything immediately indexed. Part of the fun of genealogy is the hunt!
Here, Here! Couldn’t agree more!
Thank you for saying this so well. Having to do the hard work greatly sharpens our skills, anyway.
Right On, Judy! Well Said.
My response to someone who said it was “tedious” to have to go through multiple pages to find someone: You want tedious? Try scrolling through unindexed microfilm. Got several likes from us old farts.
I agree 100% ! Scrolling page by page I wrote down everyone with the same surname I researching in the county. I still have the handwritten information by surname in a notebook.
Scrolling through the pages is often the best way to find additional information!!! I love browsing record sets 🙂
Yes! Thank you for posting.
THANK YOU! I have never seen so many impatient, pissy people when it comes to a census. Sheesh. I remember going with my dad to the local Mormon temple and scrolling through a boatload of microfilm on a machine with a backlight, having to stop and “zoom in” on the contraption if it would let me, and with the determination of a bloodhound to find “my people”. Some of these newbies should have to try it the old school way first because I think they’d have a HUGE amount more patience and appreciation that anything is up at all at this point. And maybe even give a gracious nod to those of us who bother to transcribe/index at the same time.
I do have to chuckle, though… Wait a minute, am I starting to sound like my grandparents?! lol
Excellent article! I’m so tired of the complaining, I’ve snoozed most geni groups for 30 days hoping all has settled down by then and 1950 isn’t the only topic discussed.
Every time I hear a complaint, I want to ask: how many names have you corrected so far? This is how we make it happen, people! Head over to https://www.familysearch.org/getinvolved/1950 and start helping out!
Well said! Those of us who had to use snail mail and physical libraries to do research in the past have a different perspective. I remember waiting the better part of a year for overseas certificates, only to find I had to make an additional request. I think the impatience of some leads to a lot of errors in their work. In the words of my parents “you kids have it too easy!”
“He that can have patience can have what he will.“
Attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who is my wife’s 1st cousin, 8x removed.
I feel like I’m finding old friends when I page through the census, the same names that I saw when I paged through older census records.
Well said! I am so appreciative of this release, the collaborative spirit among companies like Ancestry and FamilySearch, and how well the release went from NARA. Also to NARA for making it easy for companies to do bulk downloads.
The difference is so many “Sunday drivers” (remember that phrase?) getting into genealogy in the past 10 years. Many of these people don’t even have any idea how the information that is now so accessible to us even comes to be. Sometimes I think they believe it just magically appears online. They have no perspective on 1940 because they don’t even know what it means to actually do genealogical research.
I remember being a teenager when the 1910 census came out. I had a soundex cheat sheet. First you had to go through the microfilm for the soundex, then you had to go through the census microfilm. I also had to wait for summer vacation when I wasn’t in school to get to the Archives. I did find some members of my family and it was a very exciting time.