IT'S HERE!! The 1950 Census is Now Available!

 

by Kathy Petras

Access to the information in the 1950 census was restricted for 72 years because of a rule that the U.S. Congress passed in 1978. The National Archives released that information last Friday at 12:01 a.m. on April 1st. What a wonderful April Fool's Day surprise!

Form P1 is the form used for enumerating every U.S. citizen in 1950.

The release at the National Archives went smoothly despite many people's  predictions (mine included) about crashing the site. By using Artificial Intelligence Optical Character Recognition, AI-OCR, the archives created an indexing and searching system that works surprisingly very well! Within minutes of sitting down to my computer early Friday morning I had found both of my parents and three out of four of my grandparents. Others were reporting similar results.

Excerpt from the 1950 Census showing my grandfather, Lunas, his second wife, Della, then my father, Lawson,  Uncle Ed (aka Bud) and Aunt Dorothy. 20 questions were asked about every household member. Four people
on each page were asked an additional 20 questions. Uncle Ed was one of the people selected for the additional questions. Since he was just a 13 year old school boy, many of the questions didn't apply to him.

Because of quirks in the indexing system, it is not, at this time, an every name index. So I haven't been able to find my other grandmother and several sets of aunts and uncles - YET!

Start searching on the National Archives site HERE.  If you know the address or the enumerations district for your relatives, you can browse the district.

Later that day, the images started appearing on the FamilySearch website. 1950 census images can be browsed on FamilySearch via this MAP. 

1950 Census logo from FamilySearch

And the images are also being uploaded to the Ancestry.com and the My Heritage as well as other web sites.

Ancestry and FamilySearch are working together to refine the indexing provided by the National Archives.

To learn more about the 1950 census, how to use it and what you can find in it, register for the Family History Center's Genealogy Slam! program on May 7th at the Brunswick Library HERE. The three hour event (1-4 p.m.) will also cover U.K. Census Records and tips for locating that hard-to-find ancestor.

Hope to see you there!