Trying to find my ancestors in the 1950 US Census, I settled on a number of techniques that work well.
- For best results, locate the ancestor's Enumeration District. Don't know the ED but have an address? Use Ancestry's 1950 Census District Finder tool (link is on the home page). It's the fastest way to transform a street address into an ED. It also takes you to the ED maps in case you want to look for landmarks. Read Ancestry's explanation here.
- Using NARA's search interface, enter the location (state/county). Then add the ED. Read the description of the ED. In example above, I'm showing ED 60-36 for Maury County, TN. The ED description matches where I wanted to search.
- Add head of house as surname given name. In example above, this would be Hanes Bernard (his name is Bernard Hanes, but listing in Census is by surname first).
- This should narrow your search to a single ED and the correct page, as shown at top. Even though the automated indexing didn't correctly transcribe the given name, it did make the find for me.
Why isn't my ancestor shown in the right place?
Lots of people weren't home when the enumerator visited. April 1st was a Saturday in 1950 and some folks were out!
If the person wasn't home, the enumerator would usually note on that address line, sending you to "sheet 71, line 3" or something similar to find the person who would ordinarily be at that address. Always check pages at the end of the ED.
Starting with sheet 71, enumerators listed people who they interviewed on a subsequent visit. I've seen as many as 10 additional pages for callbacks in a single large ED. Check the end of every ED if you don't find your ancestor where expected.
Download the page
Download the Census page showing your ancestor so you can study it further and even upload to your family tree. To do this, look at top right corner of the image of that page in the ED (see above example). Click on the three vertical dots and then click on the word download.
Once the page downloads, rename that page so you know what it is. In this case, I named the file Hanes_Bernard_1950Census.jpg. Then I put it into a dedicated 1950 US Census folder on my desktop. Later, I'll copy it into my "Hanes" genealogy folder and upload it to my various family trees.
Happy hunting! I'm still looking for more ancestors and then will widen my search for FAN club members.
PS: Here's what blogger Amanda Pape suggests: "If the ED that Ancestry's 1950 Census District Finder tool turns out to be the wrong ED (and that has happened to me a lot, particularly in large cities like Houston and Chicago), then use the Steve Morse tools (that you've blogged about before). I've also had some luck, when the Ancestry ED is wrong, just searching by state, county (or city/county), and just the surname (if unique enough) or the HOH surname & first name combo. I'll usually try that first before moving on to Steve Morse."
Marian, I would add one more suggestion. If the ED that Ancestry's 1950 Census District Finder tool turns out to be the wrong ED (and that has happened to me a lot, particularly in large cities like Houston and Chicago), then use the Steve Morse tools (that you've blogged about before). I've also had some luck, when the Ancestry ED is wrong, just searching by state, county (or city/county), and just the surname (if unique enough) or the HOH surname & first name combo. I'll usually try that first before moving on to Steve Morse.
ReplyDeleteI had a case where the ED was divided in three parts, A, B, & C, so it didn't come up when I put the ED number in the NARA search. Then I had to guess which part had my ancestor, though there was a description of the boundaries. I have not had much luck with searching on surname, even when I knew the ED number.
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