Above: A 1940 U.S. Census record from Margaretville, New York, posted on Ancestry.com. On the highlighted lines are Sheldon and Madeline Birdsall and their daughter Dawn, the writer's great-grandparents and grandmother.
A treasure trove has just been opened up to historians, genealogists and biographers: As of today, the New York State records of the 1940 U.S. Census are available online at Ancestry.com and can be searched by name.
The AP reports the news today:
Starting after midnight, it will no longer be essential to provide exact addresses from seven decades ago to look for a New York connection.
With names, free searches of the 1940 U.S. census first made public in April will unlock personal information about residents of New York -- then the largest U.S. state and an immigrant hub from which people moved all over the country.
Census experts say the New York data is of national interest because tens of millions of Americans have roots in this gateway to the United States through Ellis Island, and many can now dig for more personal information.
"That's the exciting aspect about this -- the ability to search the lifetime of our mothers and fathers," said Debra Braverman, a New York-based independent forensic genealogist with clients seeking information for trust funds and estates.
The 1940 census records were made publicly available by the National Archives on April 2, but because they are not fully indexed on the National Archives website, they cannot be searched by name. Ancestry.com is going through the census records and indexing them state by state, making it possible to search by using a person's name.
So far, Ancestry.com has indexed New York, Washington D.C., Delaware, Maine and Nevada. They hope to complete name indexing of the entire 1940 census by the end of 2012, and to have more advanced indexing completed in 2013.
It's not perfect. A search for my great-grandparents, Sheldon and Madeline Birdsall, had them indexed under the name "Birdsell." But they were easy to find, and the original record itself had the correct spelling. (The record showed that Sheldon made $2,400 a year as a telephone exchange manager; at the time, the switchboard for the Margaretville Telephone Company was in the Birdsall house.)
When the 1940 census records were first released in April, Bovina historian Ray LaFever did some digging around in the records for Bovina's 806 residents (nearly 200 more than the town's population in 2010).
In the records, LaFever found people working long hours, an influx of new residents from Nebraska, and a wide range of income levels -- from farm superintendent Mathew L. Bruce's yearly salary of "$5000+" to 17-year-old Margaret Hotchkin, who earned $19 in 1939 for putting in five hours of clerical work a week at a public school.
Readers: Find any local treasure troves in the 1940 Census records? Share them with us in a comment, or let us know at editor@watershedpost.com.
