ROOTS & BRANCHES

The greatest family history scavenger hunt of the decade began on April Fools’ Day.

For anyone who’s been under a genealogical rock for the last couple of weeks, when the clock struck midnight heralding the beginning of the day April 1, 2022, the 1950 U.S. Census—with data pegged to be accurate on that day 72 years before—became public information.

From the postings I’ve seen amongst my Facebook Friends, many of them satisfied their overwhelming curiously to know where parents, grandparents, and most distant relatives lived in 1950, as well as what new facts they might glean from the enumeration.

Me? Well, not so much. I will get around to this eventually but I was much more taken by the debut of the 1930 census in 2002, since that was first one in which my parents appeared, then as mere toddlers. My mother was still alive at the time of the release and it was great to talk to her and give her the lowdown on the households in her neighborhood.

I have been paying a bit of attention to others’ finds in the 1950, however.

For some it’s been a fairly easy task with the finding aids supplied on the National Archives site. Others have been searching through all the logical places—and even chagrined when finding their ancestral addresses marked “not home” (fear not, they were revisited, but the results were put on a different sheet).

For others the key has been identifying the “E.D.” or enumeration district to which their families’ houses belonged and then do a page-by-page search for the correct entry.

Some are even finding new marriages about which they didn’t previously know!

All in all, it’s been a great opportunity to learn about some of the 151,325,798 people officially counted in 1950. When multiplied times the number of questions asked, billions of facts were released in just one day!

You can access the records released by the National Archives at this URL: https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950

This census was released with a machine-generated indexing that FamilySearch is leading a project to correct and extend. For more information on that project, go to the URL: https://www.familysearch.org/en/info/1950-census-details

Individuals and groups are getting a chance to bring the 1950 headcount up to the same searchability level as we’ve come to expect from the previous censuses.

Given that the official date of the U.S. Census in 1960 was still April 1 and I was not born until June 24 of that year, the earliest census in which I will appear will be 1970’s.

Will I still be trundling along in 2042 at age 82? Obviously only time will tell.