Oh, I'm doing the genealogy happy dance! I've been finding lots of ancestors in the 1950 US Census on the US National Archives site.
The index isn't perfect, but it works surprisingly well. Do check it out!
At a minimum, search by city and state, then enter the head of household's name in this order: Surname Given.
Ideally, first input city, state, and Enumeration District, let the ED load, and then enter the HH head's name.
In 90% of my searches, the NARA results show me the exact page where my ancestor has been enumerated.
If not, I then look carefully at the index summary for the top result before moving on.
Shown above are the extracted names for a Census page in Jackson, Michigan. My search was for Farkas Fred (Surname, Given).
Two names are in bold in this search result. The first is FREDE (not my guy). The second is FARKAS. But wait, who's this Arthur Farkas? Um...
Before I rejected this result, I checked out the names of other people in that household and hooray! This is the correct family. It was recorded on a call-back sheet (meaning the family wasn't home when enumerator originally visited) and all the other names in the household are correct, as is the occupation of the head of household.
My guess: neighbors supplied as much information as they could remember. They just didn't remember this ancestor's first name correctly. Everything else matches. Did I learn anything new? Well, the address was different from what I expected. And my search technique turned up the ancestors I wanted to locate. All I had to do was check it out thoroughly before moving to the next result.
"Check it out" is this week's #52Ancestors prompt from Amy Johnson Crow.
I did well with NARA's search pages, too, which was surprising considering all of the workarounds I was planning to try if it didn't work. I even found myself for the first time! My paternal grandparents have proved elusive, so I plan to look at their next door neighbors from 1940 and see if searching for them in 1950 helps me locate my grandparents. Wish me luck!
ReplyDeleteWishing you luck finding those elusive grandparents. I had some elusive grandparents but after double-checking the address for year before and year after, I found them!
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