Poster advertising the 1940 US Census. National Archives.
By Archivist Mark Peihl
The National Archives will release the 1940 US Census Population Schedules this spring. Census records hold a wealth of information about families and individuals and are among the most valuable tools available to genealogists. This new treasure trove may help family historians surmount some of the “brick walls” they may have run into.
The US Constitution mandates that the federal government count each of us citizens every ten years. A lot rides on census information: representation in Congress, distribution of tax money, etc. The first census was done in 1790, the most recent in 2010. Information recorded varies from one census to the next, but much of it is very private. Federal law requires that the information about individuals and families be kept secret for 72 years. The most recent census currently available, 1930, was released in 2002. The official “census date” for the 1940 census was April 1. April Fools Day falls on a Sunday this year, so the schedules won’t be available until 9 am Eastern Time (8 am Central) Monday, April 2, 2012.
Past census schedules were released on microfilm, but the new release will be available online. The National Archives has scanned all 3.8 million pages of the census records as digital image files. These files will be available for free download from the National Archives website (www.archives.gov/research/census/1940/) at 8 a.m. April 2.
There will be no name index at first. Organizations like the popular subscription-based genealogy site ancestry.com and non-profits like the Mormon Church’s familysearch.org will be getting access to the digital files the same time as the rest of us. Both of the above have announced plans to begin indexing right away April 2.
In the meanwhile, the census records will be arranged by enumeration district (ED), then by family in order of visitation. In order to locate an individual or family, you will have to know in which ED they lived, and then page through that ED’s records until you locate them.
Large cities can be divided into many hundreds of EDs. Things are a bit simpler in rural areas. Clay County’s forty-six 1940 census enumeration districts (numbered 14-1 through 14-46) largely follow township and village boundaries. The city of Moorhead is divided into eight EDs. Genealogy guru Steve Morse has developed a handy ED finder/tutorial, stevemorse.org/ed/ed.php. The site allows researchers to search for a location and find its ED number. Eventually (after the census release) your search results on Morse’s page will link directly to the first page of the appropriate ED records.
Most of the questions asked in 1940 are familiar to genealogists: name of each person, their relationship to the head of household, race, gender, age and place of birth. But several new questions reflect the nation’s difficult economic situation at the time. Taken at the tail end of the Great Depression, the country’s unemployment rate still stood at 15% in April 1940. Enumerators (the census counters) asked folks 14 and older if they had been unemployed during the week of March 24-30, or employed by a government relief agency like the Works Progress Administration or the Civilian Conservation Corps and other employment questions.
They asked about income, amount of wages and salaries earned in 1939 and whether the individual had received more than $50 from income other than wages and salaries. These questions proved controversial. According to National Archives research specialist Diane Petro, “Republican Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire mounted a campaign to force the administration to delete the questions. It was unsuccessful, but a compromise allowed individuals who did not want to give the information to the enumerator to send in a confidential card listing their income. A ‘C’ (for confidential report) will appear in the upper right hand margin opposite the name on the census record. In the end, only 2% of the population did not answer the question.”
The government was also curious about Americans’ mobility, asking “In what place did this person live on April 1, 1935?” This question may prove very helpful to genealogists trying to track their ancestors’ movements.
Some census responses are so off the wall that researchers are often left to ask, “Where did they get this stuff?” Beginning in 1880 the enumerators were instructed that if they found no one home, “then it shall be lawful for the enumerator to obtain the required information, as nearly as may be practicable, from the family or families, or person or persons, living nearest to such place of abode.” (I can only imagine what some of my neighbors might have reported about me!) The 1940 enumerators’ instructions made provision for at least identifying the person providing the information: “Write an X with a circle around it in col. 7 after the name of the person who furnishes you with the information concerning the members of the household…If you find it necessary to obtain the information from a person who is not a member of the household, write the name of this person in the left-hand margin, opposite the entries for the household, thus: ‘Information from John Brown, neighbor.’”
Each two-sided census form included lines for enumerating 80 individuals, one per line. The folks who wound up on lines 14 and 29 (about 5% of the total) were asked 15 additional questions including birth place of the parents; whether a veteran or widow or child of a vet; if the person had received a Social Security number or had paid into the program; and if the responder was a married woman or a woman who had once been married, whether she had been married more than once, age at first marriage and number of children born to her.
I’m guessing that the National Archives’ internet lines will be pretty busy at first. As soon as is practical, we will be downloading all of the Clay County images for use here in the archives. We will also be ordering old fashioned microfilm copies of the schedules. I can hardly wait for April 2!
