April Fools...or Time Travel to 1950?
Important Info & Resources for the 1950 Census Release.
Hi everyone!
It’s good to be back on a normal schedule this week after some travel for work. Before we move on to a very exciting topic for today, I want to give a quick shoutout to Joan DeMartin, a fellow Substack writer with a background in law. Joan kindly mentioned me in her Sunday Evening Reads series for her newsletter, Crime and Punishment: Why the Poor Stay Poor in America. You don’t want to miss Joan’s writings, resource recommendations, and podcasts episodes on some important topics in today’s world. Subscribe here. Thanks again, Joan!
Let’s move on to today’s post!
In Civics This Week: Census Day…72 Years Later!
On April 1, NARA released the long-awaited 1950 Census for public access. This is the first time that individual Census records have been released for immediate, free digital access. It is also the first time that the records are searchable by name (on the 1940 Census website you have to search by enumeration district).
This is a very significant development in government information availability, and it certainly does not happen every day! To put it in perspective: we will have to wait until 2032 for the 1960 Census. This is due to the “72-Year Rule” that prohibits the release of individual Census records until 72 years after each decennial “Census Day” counts are collected (this rule has an intriguing history if you’re interested in learning more).
The 1950 Census is the first Census conducted in post-World War II America, making it particularly significant for those interested in research or genealogy during that historic time period. It also captures information on the early Baby boomer generation.
The 1950 Census Website
There is a wealth of information about the 1950 Census available across many government websites, but the main one to look at is the Official 1950 Census Website, https://1950census.archives.gov/. This is where you can actually begin to search Census records.
The search page is very basic. You can search by location, name, ED, or Indian Reservation Schedule, guided by a few tips on the right. Fair warning: the search by name function is very cool, but be prepared to get a lot of results. The name index was made searchable by a technology called Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which extracts handwritten names from the digital images of records to create the index. It is an extraordinary tool, but the names will not be completely accurate, especially at the beginning. To help improve this, members of the public can actually use a transcription tool to the increase accuracy of the name index.
Take the below example, where I searched my own name (for those of you who do not know how old I am…I’ll divulge that I do not appear in the 1950 Census. This is just for fun!). As you can see, an image of an original record comes up as the first of many results.
Scrolling further down, each result provides AI extracted names, which are the products of the OCR technology. A huge advantage of this name search engine function is that the results will match records that account for variations of what you typed in. This is helpful if you aren’t sure of the spelling.
If you notice that the extracted names differ from what actually appears in handwritten form on the Census record, you can click the “Help us Transcribe Names” button, shown in the top photo of my search result. You’ll be prompted to type in your email and then provide a verification code that will be sent. After that, you’ll be able to type in transcriptions for each line of the record in question. It’s pretty cool!
Just for fun, here’s a close-up image of the first result I got from my search. I don’t know about you, but I could pour over these for hours. Try searching for your family members!
In Conclusion
Check out the resource page on the 1950 Census Website to learn more about Census research and how to access and understand important data. There are some great training videos. You can also see all of the questions asked on the 1950 Census here, which are pretty interesting to peruse. In regard to my previous mention of post-World War II history, you’ll see that one of the questions for men over the age of 14 is whether or not they served in either World War. This provides significant data for researchers or folks searching for information on World War veterans in their families.
Let me know in the comments what excites you about the 1950 Census!
See you next week.
All screenshots were taken on 4/2/2022.
While looking up family members in a rural town (though with factory employment nearby), I noticed that many people on the page were listed as "lodgers". I wondered if that meant the counted individual rented a room in a house or if the census considered apartment dwellers lodgers as well?
Thanks for the shout-out, Audrey! This is yet another fascinating post. Is there a delay in releasing all census records?