1950 United States Federal Census - Round One

During the conference, Rootstech 2022 https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/home, there was frequent mention of 1950 census information becoming available to the public April 1, 2022.  A collaboration between familysearch and ancestry with artificial intelligence (AI) to read the images and transcribe them, was  an exciting innovation since the 1940 data became available. My focus was on other things at the time, but it is possible to catch many lectures now. Today I found the most useful search term was 1950, as I did not want to pull in other countries and the titleing was inconsistant.

 

 Lisa Louise Cooke suggests preparation: 

 https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/5-ways-to-prepare-to-use-the-1950-us-federal-census

1.  Find people in your tree 
2.  Get thier addresses 
3. learn the forms and questions https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/questionnaires/1950_1.html
4.  Figure out Enumeration Districts (ED) and find maps - https://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html  (not just SSIDs) GREAT TOOL for maps
5.  Read the Enumerator Instructions https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/census_instructions/1950_instructions.html 24 pages 10MB update phone friendly from nara https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015081273297&view=1up&seq=1

 

 

Since I had a populated familysearch supported with prior census information on familysearch, this seemed a logical place to start.  However my initial effort found only images , which was more of an effort than I wanted to make.  Occassionally I would sign into familysearch to check if New Jersey was ready yet. 

https://www.familysearch.org/1950census/

I even went to the national archives and started poking at Enumeration Districts.

https://1950census.archives.gov/

I did better looking at older census records of the individuals had not moved.  However no real progress was made.

Tuesday May 10 I read rumors on social media that ancestry was completed... and that the census information was free. When I searched on my family name I found 29 hits. Tried to narrow it down by state, but got the same result. I found 4 locations that had household(s) that were relevant. Most had errors. Some a/o confusion or missing last letters were in the results.  One was quite mangled andI  only found because it was next door. Reporting the problem did not immediately change the search results.  While I only changed names, I saw options for changing other things. Do they get reviewed? incorporated? How long does it take? Similar to familysearch, ancestry then offered to tie the records to people in a tree. While I am not eager to try to keep another tree, I did wonder what it would take, and what tools would help.

While Ancestry provides a citation that is easy to copy, my gut says when documenting sources, go to the original source. To me that is the National Archive. Hopefully that permits avoiding documenting 3 sources for the same images. I also feel that it is more likely to be available to all for free indefinitely. Searching by name is now available there too. However it is not that simple.  My paternal grandfather's first name was incorrect (I have a theory on the guess.)  Do I need to fix each separate transcription set?Both the URL and the citation are less obvious.  National Archives permits downloading a selection of file sizes / detailing in images. So where do I want to store maps and forms? Private strategy? Sharable strategy? Will familysearch be enough? when? Update: still poking around and found a collection of info at https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950 . also created a login with the intent of collecting relevant documents.

This brings me back to how do I track what I've done and what I have left to do? For example, I've searched for my family name on ancestry and updated the entries for this branch, and my grandfather on National Archives. I did not find two uncles. I did not pursue other lines....This needs to be more obvious searching on assorted criteria like db, website, individual, family, location.

Gramps has an addon Forms to make it easier to add a census event with a collection of attribute/value pairs.

https://gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php/Addon:Forms_Gramplet#Form_Selector

I did not realize how to process families until watching a video. 

https://youtu.be/Y5hijkAF6eE

For intformation on GEDCOM foo 

https://gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php/Residence_and_census 

My initial thought is they copied the form from 1940 to 1950 and did a bad job of updating it. Is it true? Do I delete and re add after fixing? has anybody fixed it yet? discourse -- hmmm.Apparently I should try to export to reunion too. Once again I struggle with how to pull the data out that I just put in.