Today is April Fool's Day, or as I saw it on another site early this morning, Lirpa Sloof Yad. There are plenty of pranks going around like the story about Minnesota DOT tunneling under Wisconsin to implement high-speed rail service or the attack on an Improv Everywhere actor on the New York Subway (and there are a number of lists of this year's pranks online to help alleviate your boredom). But one story that is not a joke is that we are now officially one year away from the public release of the 1940 U.S. census enumeration. There is quite a lot of interesting information at the U.S. Census Bureau's official website, but I don't see anything obvious about how the original 1940 documents will be released yet. One site making the rounds today among my genealogy friends on Facebook is 1940census.net; they've got a bit of information and seem to be a gathering place of sorts for links to more information about the enumeration and the era in which it was made.
It will probably be a little while after the release next year before the entire 1940 enumeration is online as scans of the original pages, but there again, based on the explosive growth in indexing at FamilySearch (which is one project where I participate), I don't think we'll have to wait too long. I guess the best task for me to do right now to prepare for the release would be to look through my databases to find out who was alive and would have been counted in 1940 so I know where to concentrate my searches.
1 comment:
I share your excitement. More of my 'recent' relatives would start appearing in this census. I was excited to get a membership to Ancestry.com to get at the 1930 Census. I suppose the 1940 Census will be just as exciting.
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