Prepping for the 1950 US Census: NARA ED Maps

I've been researching the street addresses and Enumeration Districts of dozens of ancestors, with the goal of being able to browse for these folks when the 1950 US Census pages are released (unindexed) on April 1. Most of these ancestors lived in urban areas, although a few were in rural areas.

Unified Census ED Finder doesn't cover every street in every town

Researching ancestors in rural Upper Sandusky, Wyandot County, Ohio, I was unable to find the town in Steve Morse and Joel Weintraub's Unified Census ED Finder tool. This is the easy-to-use tool I normally use to transform a street address into an Enumeration District. 

As shown in image at top, Wyandot is one of the few counties where the Steve Morse/Joel Weintraub tool has no provision for town or street address input. See FAQs 302 and 403 for an explanation.**

Because I do have a street address, I've learned to use National Archives's Enumeration District maps to locate the appropriate ED.

NARA Enumeration District maps to the rescue

To reach the ED maps via Steve Morse's site, click on the link titled "Viewing ED Maps in One Step." It's at the very bottom of the page (see brown arrow). Or click to reach that link here. 

At the Steve Morse link, once you enter the state, county, and town, you'll be taken to a page like the following:

Now you can choose the NARA viewer OR go directly to the images on the NARA server. Both work, just read the advantages and disadvantages to see which you prefer. 

Here is the small version of the NARA map for Upper Sandusky, Wyandot County, OH. I clicked to enlarge the map and looked around each ED until I located the ancestor's street address on West Bigelow.

As a result, I discovered my husband's great aunt Etta Blanche Steiner Rhuark's residence in ED 88-27. Next April, I'll be browsing pages of that ED to find her.

Let me call attention to Beth Finch McCarthy's excellent graphic about preparing to browse the 1950 US Census, including the use of NARA maps.

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**Joel Weintraub explains: The National Archives has stated that urban areas of 5 or more EDs should have online 1950 ED maps, although I've seen such maps with less than that. Our One-Step criteria for street indexes are the location should have 5 or more EDs and also have 5,000 or more people. Upper Sandusky according to my information had 4,397 people in 1950 so I didn't include it on my list of areas to be done. We still have a database for searching ED definitions. In your case.... go to the Unified Tool, pick Ohio, pick from the city list "Other (specify)" which opens a box where you can type Upper Sandusky. You should then see 7 EDs with that name on the their ED transcribed description... on the lower left. Click on "more details" and you should see the ED transcribed definitions for each of the seven which also may help determine the exact ED wanted.