1940 Census opens window on history

1940 Census opens window on history

At 9 a.m. ET Monday, the government will unlatch a new window on history: 1940 Census records open to the public for the first time.

Also for the first time, the images of the logs painstakingly handwritten by Census workers who traipsed door to door to count all 132.2 million Americans living then will be available online immediately for free.

People's names, addresses, ages and even more personal information such as their marital status, how many kids they had, how much they earned and what they did for a living were kept under wraps for 72 years as required by a confidentiality law.

Every 10 years, another Census becomes public. Each time, historians and genealogy buffs go atwitter over the bount y of information that can help them trace family trees and draw an even more precise portrait of how Americans lived.

About 21 million Americans who show up in the 1940 records are still alive.

National Archives at College Park via AP

An enumerator interviews actor Cesar Romero to get data for the 1940 Census.

"This is a big deal," says Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist who has worked for the military to track down living relatives of soldiers who died in World War II and the Korean War and whose remains are just being found. "This is huge for us."

The unveiling of the 1940 records will be marked by a ceremony at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in Washington and at several of its branches from Boston and Philadelphia to Fort Worth and San Francisco. The Archives has been running a countdown clock on its website and has launched 1940census.archives.gov for its first online release.

"There's a little bit more excitement this time because it is being released online and it's immediately available to people," says Rebecca Warlow, 1940 Census project manager at the Archives. "Anybody with Internet access can sit with their PC and desktops and search to their heart's content. Previous Censuses were released on microfilms."

What's in store:

Digitized Census records 3.8 million images will be available free on the Archives site. People searching for relatives are advised to determine what "enumeration district" they lived in to facilitate the search. The site will not be searchable by name but by state, county, town and Census district an urban area that a Census worker could cover in two weeks or a rural area that could be counted in a mont h.

The National Archives partnered with Archives.com, a family history website owned by a Silicon Valley data commerce company, to run the site.

Familysearch.org (the genealogy organization run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), Archives.com and findmypast.com joined forces to form the 1940 U.S. Census Community Project to digitize every bit of the Census to the point where the records can be searched by name with the help of volunteers.

Smolenyak, spokeswoman for the consortium, says that using volunteers will provide a low-cost alternative to for-profit sites such as ancestry.com. How long it will take depends on the number of volunteers.

"It's a lot of data, and it benefits everybody in the genealogical and hist orical realm," she says. "It's a chance for the latest generation to give back to the greatest generation. When you're indexing a page, what you're essentially doing is stepping back in time."

USGenWeb Project, which also works with FamilySearch.org, is launching a volunteer effort to provide free genealogical research help on its usgenweb.org site.

"My parents will be on this Census for the first time," says Sherri Bradley, national coordinator. "It's exciting."

The popular ancestry.com site, which plans to offer the 1940 Census products free through 2013, plans a detailed index searchable by street address.

Kevin Paul, 57, a retired Army first sergeant who served in Iraq, began tracing his and his wife's family trees eight years ago when an uncle he didn't know was alive surfaced.

He says he started thinking, "Who else is out there?" He has trac ed his late father's family all the way back to 1818 and his late mother's to 1832.

"I started digging, and I dug and I dug," says Paul, who works for the General Services Administration.

He found his dad listed in the 1930 Census released 10 years ago but is eager to scour the 1940 Census, the first to ask people where they were five years earlier a way to track mobility.

1940 was the first Census to ask a set of more detailed questions, from income to amount of schooling and unemployment. One in 20 households were asked even more questions, from how many times women had married and how old they were the first time they married to where their parents were born and what their native language was.

The 1940 Census was taken at the close of a decade of economic collapse the Great Depression. The last Census in 2010 followed years of financial hardship that sent the housing market into a tailspin, stocks plunging and the U.S. unemployment rate near double digits.

The two "are linked from a demographic viewpoint," says Census Director Robert Groves, who will look at the records to find his grandfather, Stephen Groves, who lived at 5237 Tennessee St. in St. Louis in 1940. "These are the two low points in the growth of the country in recent history."

The nation grew only 7.3 in the 1930s because of the Depression, which tamped fertility. The population grew 9.7 in the past decade, a slowdown largely attributed to the weak economy.

"In a way, they're ki nd of similar events," Groves says.