1940 Census

Been playing around with the 1940 Census for, well, most of the day today. It is not indexed by name yet, which makes it harder than hell to find anything in. First you need a rough idea of where in the city or town that your ancestor lived at the time. A good one to use is the WWII Draft card info. All of that info was collected in 1942, which is a pretty close period of time to the Census. Failing that, your next step is the 1930 Census. I don’t know. Ten years is a long time for most people to stay put. As much as I hear about “People didn’t move around all that much”, the less I believe it. People moved around quite a lot from what I have seen. It is not something new.

The way it is currently carved up is along what they call Enumerator Districts. Pretty much, they take a map and carve it up by reasonable chunks for the canvassers (Enumerators to those in the biz) to handle in a day. I am using this site to help determine what Enumerator District my peeps could be found in. You then have to go through the Census “packet” page by page until you find (or don’t find) your people. These packets are typically about 33 pages in length. Looking at all of these forms on a 10″ screen at 1024×768 resolution is tough work!

Anyway, I had some luck with my first couple of searches.

My father’s mom and dad were married and my father was two years old when this Census was taken. We can add a new spelling of Hannan to the list; Hanan. This Census showed that my grandfather had not worked in two years! This sparked an email conversation between me and my sister, the result of which may turn out that our grandmother’s name will finally be added to her headstone. She’s in the same grave as her husband…and his first wife. Somehow, my father never got around to having her name added. My sister is looking into costs. I came up with a saying, as it already says “Beloved Wife” about the first one. “Deo faire breis linn”. Forever watching over us. She spoke Irish and it seems that she really bailed my grandfather out of a serious financial problem. Giving her something as Gaeilge just seems to make sense, at least to my sister and me.

The next person I searched for was my mother’s father. I could not find him in his hometown in upstate NY, but about a year later he married my mother’s mother, who lived in Queens. It is possible that he had moved to Queens. I will never find him until this sucker gets indexed by names.

I then searched for my mom’s mom. I noticed that I did not have her 1930 Census, so I had to find that first. It was listed under a name that was messed up during transcription. I then cleaned up a bunch of records for her dad and was in really good shape to find them in 1940, which I did. My then 18 year old grandmother was working at Macy’s Department store. Her father for Railway Express, a job he would have for many, many years.

I then switched over to Jenny’s side of the tree, but I quickly struck out tracking down her dad’s dad. If you wanted an example of moving around a bunch, this is the guy you should look at! Jenny’s dad inherited this gene, too. Jumping beans, they are! Holy hell!

So, then I got tired of doing this. I need to go get a notebook for Irish class from CVS, and then I will grab a coffee…and study IP subnetting a bit before heading home. Not such a bad day at work!