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Countdown to the release of the 1940 Census, April 2, 2012! |
The 1940 census will be released online on April 2, 2012.
In two months, April 2, 2012, the 1940 U.S. Census is going to be released to the public. The Census is mandated by the Constitution to be taken every 10 years and the results are made public after 72 years. The last ones we’ve had is the 1930 batch released in 2002 (wow).
My dad, Alfred passed away in February 2000 and unfortunately he barely knew his family. I tinkered briefly with finding my Kitchens relatives shortly after he died, but to very little effect. However, in December 2005, while we were living way out in Olathe, Kansas I decided to get serious about genealogy. So I was living my whole life about two hours south of my mom’s history in Macon Co., North Carolina and roughly two hours north of my dad’s in Macon (city), Georgia and it took being 1000 miles away in Kansas to start my quest.
So when I started the 1930 Census was available and Family Tree Maker included a free year subscription to ancestry.com, so I got that as a Christmas present and started searching. Fortunately Macon Co. NC and North Carolina in general has really great records online, both via Ancestry.com and their own network of genealogy sites that I was able to really get cracking that winter.
More on those individual quests later, back to the census.
My dad was born in 1937 and my mom in 1938, so this will be the first time I’ll see them in the census documents. If you’re not used them before, Ancestry.com makes available scans of the actual documents and indexes them for searching. So you can see, save, and print the actual form that was in the census worker’s hands when they interviewed your relative. In 50-60 years (if we’re still here), I’m not sure how it’s going to work since the forms are so much more boring now than they used to be. But let them deal with that.
The census forms bring to life people you know and people you will meet and discover that you didn’t know existed.
Right now bring on 1940!
There are a lot of questions I have and cannot wait to have answered.