The 1950 Census for Genealogy

we are going to cover everything that you need to know about the 1950 census and that is actually turns out to be kind of a lot so we're going to just jump into it and uh introduce you to it kind of show you what you should be looking for what you're going to find what you can do now in fact at the end i've got five important things that you could be doing right now as a genealogy researcher to prepare and actually make some headway before the 1950 census comes out so uh let's jump into it i i love the 1950s um and there was a lot happening in the united states at that time and the senses certainly captured so much of it the census uh generally speaking is really kind of the backbone of genealogy research isn't it it's gives us that opportunity to see our families and our relatives and our ancestors in family groups which is wonderful it's not just an individual and a record but it's them in the context of their family your family and that helps you find your way back through time so they started back in 1790 the u.s federal census did and it was taken every 10 years so that's a really nice snapshot when you're covering a couple of centuries it's really great to be able to go in and take a look at these family groups decade by decade now currently you've got public access to the us census for 1790 all the way through 1940 and those of you have been at genealogy for a while remember the excitement of the 1940 census being released well what are you going to find out in 1950 it's going to be able to answer i hope some questions for you like where was your family living in 1950 and hey did you have any american relatives living abroad because this time around they were captured in the census what did your relatives do for a living that's kind of fun to find out and what was their household income those are just a couple of the things and we're going to show you the form we're going to show you all the different types of information you're going to be able to gather from the 1950 census now this census also really stands out because it ushered in some really new features when it came to data collection and particularly improvements and their goal of course which i'm sure was the goal every time but they really made some strides in 1950 was to be more complete and more accurate and that's music to our ears isn't it because if you have been researching for a while you have probably been in one of the census records and just been unable to put your hands on a family or person that you were sure should have been there and there's lots of reasons for that but sometimes it's just human error or it's just how complicated it is to take the senses so in 1950 they were really striving to um improve that and to capture as many people as accurately as they could so the beauty of this is that these new records from 1950 are going to hopefully help you confirm some of those things that you already know i know i've got stuff that i'm looking forward to just kind of checking the box i've got another piece of evidence that backs up what i thought was true but also hey if it's a new record collection it's going to provide you with some new clues and new information and we don't want to just stop there do we we want to be able to take that and say now i know what i'm looking for and go find more evidence that backs it up or maybe expands that information you know there's only so much they could capture on a census form so we want to make the most of it so let's dig into the 1950 census okay hold your horses um it's not available yet i hate to break that to you but if you're new to genealogy you may not realize that it's not out yet but that's okay there's a lot you can do because hey this party is just around the corner it's april of 2022 and there's a lot that we can do right now you know when you're gonna get into any kind of new area of research it's so important to really get familiar with that record collection understand what was happening with it because we can make a lot of false assumptions when we look at that information we interpret it if we're not really getting what's going on and who's taking down this information and why is this happening right so to prepare for the party to get your corsage pinned on we need to cover some of the basics and show you what to look for because it's never too soon to get acquainted with an important genealogical record like this and it is coming out from the national archives in just under a year in fact april 1st uh which was last week as the time of this recording was exactly one year to go and of course it's not all going to just like be instantly available on april 1st particularly with the pandemic going on the national archives has certainly had a lot of closures because of that we have to kind of bear that in mind but generally speaking we are pretty much exactly one year from the release of the records and that's 72 years april 1st of 2021 with 72 years well no that's 2022. it's getting confusing isn't it april 1st of 2022 is exactly 72 years from the official census date in 1950 which was april 1st of 1950 and that brings us to the dreaded 72-year rule okay so why do we have to wait 72 years before we get our hands on a public record like the us census back in 1978 they made a law and i've got a reference for you and it's it's in the show notes for this episode so it was this law passed on october 5th of 1978 and it restricts access to the decennial census records to only the person who's named on the record or their legal heir so if for some reason you have a legal proceeding or reason to need to verify something from 1950 and you can prove your illegal error you could get access sooner but generally speaking that's not the case for most of us so the 72-year rule means that the 1940 census that we got a little while back was released in on april 2nd of 2012 and that means we're going to get the 1950 in 2022 so how did this 72-year thing happen there's always a lot of question about that and there's a lot of people who would like to see that get shortened up i can appreciate that a lot of times the assumption is it was based on life expectancy but that actually may not be really the case uh it it kind of sounds logical 72 years um but in the show notes i'm going to have a link to an essay that joel weintraub did several years ago and he talked about the fact that really that it appeared to have evolved from when the national archives was created now i did some digging over at the census.gov and the national archives and there are some letters from the census bureau director and the national archivist and they're talking about it in the 1950s in 1952 there's kind of an exchange but they don't actually say why 72 years and joel's proposal on this idea was that in 1942 when they finally got the national archives up and running they decided to release 18 or 1790 through 1870 those census records they had them there was no mention of you know copyright or promises to the to the public and so they made them available well that happened to be 72 years since the 1870 census and even then we don't know for sure if there was discussion oh well we should wait the life expectancy here's the bottom line you got to wait 72 years sorry but that means that 1950 census is just around the corner so in preparation for using the 1950 census there are some things that you need to know and particularly when it comes to using it for genealogy research so first we need to understand who was counted during the 1950 census because in addition to americans that were living here in the united states in the continental united states which was 48 states at the time because hawaii and alaska were still territories at that time uh but it they counted the people in the uh 48 states they also counted members of the armed forces uh crews on vessels at sea and employees of the us government and their families if they were living abroad so if any of your ancestors happen to fall in any of these categories you've got a lot more to look forward to in the 1950 census but you still have to be aware that these are these were still other there were still other people living abroad that were not included okay they didn't fall neatly into those categories in those cases they were reported by their families or even their neighbors who happen to be living in the u.s so what does that mean it's second-hand information we think of that as primary and secondary sources this falls in the more the secondary or thirdly category is that a term it's second hand which means it's not as reliable in fact the census bureau decided not even to include the numbers on those people in their published statistics officially because they just weren't absolutely sure that that information was correct so this is important to keep in mind if you know that one of your ancestors might have been abroad in some form at that time and you're having a hard time finding them located that might be the reason so just keep that in mind so this is the form okay wow has the u.s census form changed that gone are the days where we just have a little tick mark and then eventually we got a name and an age you know and in every census they add a little more detail this form has a whole lot more so what are you gonna see things like their address okay whether the house they're living in was on a farm or not of course their name their relationship to the head of the household typically speaking the head of the household would be the husband if there's a husband and there's a wife and there's kids uh it could be a woman who's running a boarding house there's a lot of you know they'll basically establish whoever the head of the household is and then each person is listed in terms of their relationship to that person it'll cover race sex age their marital status their birthplace if they were foreign born whether or not they were naturalized after they came to the united states what their employment status was um how many hours they worked in a week what their occupation and what the industry was that occupation fell within and what class of worker they were okay well so now we kind of know who the people are that we're talking about and what they're going to be asked on the form we need to talk a little bit about the geography of the 1950 census uh it's fascinating to see the efforts that were made here's um showing that they're uh working within the territory of alaska and doing a census that's a brave census taker okay so geographically what did this cover the continental united states right those 48 states the territories of alaska and hawaii so even though they're not states yet they do fall within the the 1950 census also america samoa the canal zone guam puerto rico the virgin islands and some of the smaller territories within the us so it covers more than just the basic united states and that's good for all of us that brings us to when we talk about geography this is really unlocking the key to the 1950 census because the enumeration district maps are really going to be your key and this is part of your homework before we get to april of 2022. so it takes a lot of census takers they're called enumerators and just to count 150 million people so there were about half as many people in the united states in 1950 than there are today so 150 million people it still takes a lot of people so this workforce had to be trained right to hopefully make fewer mistakes so here was their plan in 1950 they had 26 chief enumerators and they were gonna teach a couple of hundred of their main instructors those people were going to go out and train about 8 300 crew leaders and they were going to train the 140 which really i think ended up being about 143 000 census enumerators so that's a lot of people um this came from the u.s census uh bureau website and i just think it's really interesting to see what it was taking at this point in american history to cover all of these people well how did all of these enumerators these 140 000 how do they know where to go how do they make sure that they're not crossing paths with other enumerators or that somehow they've missed a neighborhood altogether that's where enumeration districts come from come in to play and they're called eds we call them eds so enumeration districts now this is the geographic area that this one census taker is going to cover and that's how they know what they're going to be doing so it was designed you know they drew out all these maps and they had to figure out how can we assign each single census enumerator and make sure they're not crossing paths with other people so that this is their one area of responsibility and it has to be an area that they could cover completely in the two to four weeks that they were going to be working so um these were absolutely key and you can imagine that the the prep that had to go into this well before the census day of april 1st so this is what an enumeration map looks like and as you can see the districts are drawn up in really detailed maps they're kind of in color if you've looked at the 1940 enumeration district maps you know that those were at least the ones i've looked at are all in black and white drawings so these are almost looking more a little bit kind of like sanborn fire insurance maps if you're familiar with those um but it it really gives us just one more glimpse into our ancestors neighborhoods and um i think that's just kind of exciting now we have to remember that these maps are designed specifically for the census so we can't assume that numbers are necessarily house numbers right and the big numbers that you see in orange those are the ed numbers okay and you'll find in the bottom of each map there's going to be a key that will explain to you the colors that they're using you can see we've got green lines on here and orange lines those are all explained in the legends or the keys of each of the maps so okay an enumeration district drawn into detailed maps showing us our ancestors neighborhood in 1950 how far along it has come and and you can obviously if you're familiar with the neighborhood you'll see what's not there yet um and it really is the key you need these in order to be prepared to find your ancestors in the 1950 census when it gets released but the good news is ed maps don't fall within the 72-year rule yay so that means you can have access to them now okay so we can start doing our homework today and we have to keep in mind it takes time for the census to be indexed and it's got to get indexed to be searchable right we're so used to being able to go in and type in an ancestor's name and have them pop up in a census record but that's not the experience we're going to have as soon as this gets released so released means from the national archives here's the files they're digitized right but that's it you have to know where to go within them there's no keyword searching there's no name searching or anything so the only way to really know to be able to dig into those digitized files before they're indexed is you've got to know what ed your ancestor is in at that time and that's going to help you because there's over 8 000 enumeration district maps okay so these are held primarily at the national archives in the and they're part of record group 29 and it's a series it's called enumeration district and related maps 1880 through 1990 series okay so this this episode my friends of the show super important to get the show notes uh the show notes are already done yes i know i'm always late it's always a couple of days later but i told bill this week i i'm gonna get these babies done before the show starts so people can go straight to them as you're watching after you're watching you've got show notes how do you get them okay well i have a video here on the genealogy gems channel called show notes so you can watch that if you'd like to see step-by-step how to get there but it's super easy you go to my website genealogygems.com click elevenses in the menu and or you can just do slash elevenses and then click this episode and there you're gonna find all the notes absolutely everything i prepared for this um video is written out for you and if you're a premium member you're gonna have the downloadable ad-free pdf cheat sheet okay so that's gonna and that's gonna be very searchable for you too so it's pretty long this time it's really long so this cheat sheet uh you're gonna wanna be able to search within it and you can do that as a premium member because you'll have the pdf so i'll have a link in those show notes that are going to take you over to the enumeration district maps over the national archives this is what it looks like as you can see on the screen but there's an even better tool to find them and that is stephen morse's uh one step tool okay is it stephenmorse.org nut.com.org okay so when you go there you you'll see this tool now i want to show it to you in action because it's really cool um you go in and you select the state okay so if i know that my grandmother lived in california and i'm gonna go and pick her county which was the san joaquin county and she lived in the city of stockton okay so this is the tool to find 1915 enumeration district maps we're going to click the button and you're going to see they're going to give us a link that will take us to the maps for this district 75 which is the county over at the national archives so if we click that link that's going to take me straight to i don't have to dig around that national archives website which is not that user-friendly and i'm going to be able to go straight to these enumeration district maps for the city of stockton in san joaquin county and you can kind of view them here you can dig around and take a look see if i can find her street which was arcade street you can also do the zoom in zoom out you can do full screen and most importantly download so you can click the download button here at the national archives website let it load it's a big file because it's a really high resolution image we're going to right click on it and save images so you can save this image as a jpeg to your computer hard drive and i just find it's a lot easier to look at it in my viewer on my own computer than to try to maneuver ongoing and work with it over the national archives and that way it becomes part of your genealogy record collection so back at stephenmorse.org you'll notice that on the home page if you look in the upper right left hand corner we see a lot of different categories and we're going to be looking for senses so if you hover over census now you can see there's a lot of different tools and we open this folder up and there's lots here we couldn't possibly cover it all in this hour together but i want to draw your attention to the unified census ed finder it covers 1880 to 1950. so notice that some of the things are crossed out don't worry about it it's all about what you've pre-selected so we have to go back in and select our state that this is if you have the address so if you know and i know the address of my grandmother so i can go in and go back to california san joaquin once i click stockton this tool the unified census ed finder can accept a house number so first of all they've got links to all of the different ed maps i'm going to put in her house number which is 21 and once i do that i can go to street and arcade is listed notice it has brought it down to three lengths this is wonderful um so i think if i look here you know there's some there's 75 now if i saw different than 75 if i saw 76 um it might be because you didn't select a county because there'll be different county numbers so if you're not sure the county or you think there's only one of those towns that's fine you might not have to select that but if we click view the details here it is now i think she lived here arcade which was near el dorado street that portion of arcade so it's probably 75 won but guess what it's not available yet that's the census that's the link they've already put in to take you to the census page but if you click the other link it shows you the records that stephen morse and joel weintraub used to locate these districts so this is really about what district what ed number is your address okay so that tool tells us this is the ed number and that will then be able to lead us over to find the map there's a lot more resources over at stevenmores.org so i encourage you to go check that out on the home page i use the the what is it alt or control f so i can do find on page and i just type in 1950 and you can scroll through all the different links that have information about the 1950 census because it's not just in this one section some of them are spread out there is a link there for problems using the 1950 enumeration district maps read that it's really helpful because if you run into some snags as you're doing your preliminary research in preparation it will probably help explain what challenges you're running into you know because it depends on the area the geographic area whether it was an urban city or agricultural whatever you might have different issues finding ed maps now as we've talked about in past videos here at genealogy gems it's really important to understand the collection that you're working with because that helps you better interpret what you're looking at okay so i just want to touch on a little bit of the history in terms of enumerators it was really interesting to discover up until 1870 the job of census taker was actually held by the u.s marshal that's interesting so they didn't go out and hire enumerators it was just the marshall's job so have you ever been frustrated trying to find somebody who's like not there in a census from 1870 or earlier well it turns out that these u.s marshals didn't get a lot of training you know they didn't get big training manuals and and they didn't even have forms printed uh until 1830 to use it was all handwritten so they had a challenge it's very possible that mistakes got made or people got missed or whatever because there was just a little lack of training so um in 1879 they had an act of congress passed and it shifted the job from the marshals to people who were specially hired just to be enumerators and that was just in time for the 1880 census which was collecting even more information in fact um here's frank wilkerson and he was a census numerator and i just had to share him with you because he had a few opinions of his neighbors that he was enumerating so he says that uh joe blah he's a loafer as his occupation and uh this other guy i think his name is coleman that he's a blowhard you never know what you'll find in the senses so i digress let's talk about these sunsets and numerators a little bit more because uh one of the interesting things about the 1950 census is it's the last time that enumerators solely met individually in person with the people that they were taking the census of in 1960 that was when they started mailing out questionnaires so this is really kind of a last glimpse at a purely in person very personal census taking in the united states so thankfully they had a whole lot more to work with than the u.s marshals of days gone by and why is this what does this matter to you it matters because the enumerator the enumerator instruction booklet explains everything about why they did what they did why they recorded things the way they did and it is available it's a 24-page enumerator instruction booklet um that they received and it's really important for understanding what you're seeing on the page as you look at it so this is homework that you can do to become more familiar with and i would really recommend it's it's an interesting read anyway but to just read through it because if we see a mark or a notation on this more complicated 1950 form or maybe they left a field blank or some other kind of anomaly well you need to go to the instructions to understand why that was chances are and i can tell you so many examples of working with the senses and seeing something strange or wondering why something that was the way it was and sure enough when i looked it up in the census enumerator instructions there was an example and an instruction there for them so it really gives you the back story so that you can accurately interpret you know it's one thing if these folks did a much better job of getting accurate information collected but if we're misunderstanding it i think it kind of does a disservice to the whole process we have to understand the why that's kind of my mantra about all of genealogy we understand the why behind what we're seeing what we're looking at what we're trying to interpret and you know build as a case in our genealogy research we're going to be far more likely to interpret correctly so this is a really fascinating and hey it's free it's available today so uh you can download it at the census bureau website and again go to my website genealogygems.com elevenses and click on this episode now this is technically episode 51 you'll see census on the picture and um click that because in the show notes i've got the links and more information about these instructions now here's a perfect example of why this really matters and why you need the 1950 census enumerator instructions and it's because back in 1940 we started seeing these x's with circles around them and when you first look at it like what's he doing playing tic-tac-toe i mean what's happening we've never seen these before prior to the 1940 census well if you go to the 1940 census instructions it says enter x in a circle after the name of the person furnishing the information so for the first time the enumerator was able to talk to us as the uh interpreter or the genealogist many many years later to say hey it was um you know tallulah or richard who gave me this information about this entire family and as you look at the family like we might see here that now it looks like otto and maybe that's martha i don't know um the the wife in this family gives the information she's the person the numerator is actually talking to now we see that fayette is a brother-in-law now this might be her well it's the brother-in-law the head of the household so it's probably her brother he's probably not there today so information about the wife we can see is pretty darn accurate it must be well unless she doesn't want to tell you what her age is but um she's probably pretty accurate by herself she probably knows if she was naturalized what year that was but if she's giving the enumerator information about her brother now that's maybe a little more we have to just be extra careful to verify that information and the more people in the family or if there's boarders who are living there and paying rent you know it really matters who gave the information how well they knew that person and we don't know if that person was in the house at the time that the enumerator was so little notations like this may be popping up in our 1950 census and we're going to want to understand what they're about it's also an important to understand who does not get enumerated and the instructions tell us that as well so here's kind of some of the folks who are going to fall in that do not enumerate category in 1950 people temporarily visiting the household so i think in earlier you know censuses we found sometimes duplicates it would be they're staying here but it's temporary but they actually have a house over here and you see them twice they were trying to be very careful not to pick up anybody who doesn't actually permanently reside at that household forest foreign citizens visiting embassies and similar facilities students below college level who are boarding uh and and they're boarding to attend school locally so this sounds like if you wanted your child to go to a better school and they were in let's say high school so you send them to go live with aunt martha so this is a college uh this is a student below college level boarding you know in aunt martha's home to attend school locally but she's not supposed to be enumerated with aunt martha because that's not her her home her residence is with her family uh college students visiting but who live elsewhere to attend school people who eat with the family but don't sleep there and i suppose there would be people like that maybe they just go it's almost like a hotel situation domestic workers who don't sleep there so if somebody is a maid during the day in the house but they are not a living maid then they need to be enumerated at their own house household members who are currently an inmate in a prison or another institution if they're in a mental institution a senior living institution that type of thing ship crew members who or people who live in lighthouses it gets very specific and absent soldiers and sailors so if again you run into situations where you are not coming up with somebody that you think you should any kind of a situation that it's just not adding up as neatly as you'd like it to head to the instructions the enumerator instructions are going to shed light on it most likely now is anybody in your family tree born between january and march of 1950 i was looking in the live chat and i saw that theresa was excited she's hoping to find herself as an infant in the 1950 census well if she was born january february or march of 1950 then there was a special card completed just for her and this would be true for any infants in the first three months of 1950 so they had this special infant card and this was completed and what's really interesting about this is there's almost an entire page in the instruction booklet explaining when this is taken how it should be filled out you know all of that stuff and i don't know the answer about what whether these cards are going to be available i need to do some more digging because i think it would be interesting to know and maybe somebody in our live chat knows if the national archives has that as another series or if it's going to be attached to the census records might just be a special little bonus to look for but it's important to know that it exists so if you do have people who were infants in your family at that time then go check out the instructions for the infant card so the coverage and completeness in the 1950 census we're hoping it's going to be better than ever we might find more complete and accurate information and the part of that is because there were some new procedures put in place so they had the improved enumerator training uh providing enumerators with detailed street maps better than ever they even published missing person forms in the local newspapers to try to to bring out uh folks who they were looking for and they set aside a very special night to conduct a special enumeration of people who were in hotels or tourist courts you know you've heard of motor courts when people were motoring around the country they would stay in these little um tents or sheds or little you know motor courts or if they were transient in any way and in 1950 that makes a lot of sense because my gosh we're getting the highway systems we're getting cars more than ever the world war ii is over people are on the move and that posed a really interesting uh challenge for the enumerators so counting people of course when they're moving around is challenging they could be counted twice or worse they could be not counted at all so census takers made a huge effort to capture these people and i know when i look through my grandmother's scrapbooks and photo albums oh my gosh there was there was more camping pictures than anything they were always on the road going camping in at one point they had rented a little motor home so the census bureau came up with something called t night canvases and you can see there's even photos over the census bureau of all of these different enumerators men and women who made the rounds and they did this really specific in a very specific way so t night t is for transient and there were two nights set aside it was april 11th which was a tuesday and april 13th which was thursday and the goal was on those two days that's when we're going to go and just canvas all of these different people who are on the move so it provided a more accurate count of people who didn't have a fixed address or they were away from home and there were certainly people who didn't have a fixed address so tuesday april 11 1950 now if you go again head back to those instructions uh it says here quote an intensive drive to cover in a single night the occupants of certain places usually devoted to transients so they're talking about hotels uh the ymca tourist courts now a lot of young men right they're back from world war ii and they're moving around and the ymca was an incredibly unpopular place to get a really inexpensive but safe place to stay and so they were saying in 1940 there were more than a hundred thousand rooms for the ymca so that's a lot of people and sometimes two to a room or three to a room so according to the instructions the enumerators were supposed to visit uh these facilities between 5 pm and 11 pm which kind of makes sense because what it's check-in time and then they did it again uh 7 a.m to noon the next morning check out time right and then on the 13th they uh paid attention to missions and flop houses so t night enumerators assigned to these facilities what they were supposed to do was station themselves in the lobby and they were going to stop people and ask them you know if they've been enumerated they were going to interview people they had to talk to the guests and the staff who knew the guess as well so they were using a very special form to do this and it's called the individual census a report form it's called an icr and this was completed by the person not the enumerator which i think is really interesting because most records that we're looking at these are going to be filled out by the numerator but in this case you're talking about let's say at the ymca and there's a lot of people around you might even be rooming with a couple of guys so in order to try to kind of protect their privacy or if they're at a hotel and they're doing business they don't want to be talking about what's your income and then writing it down so they would hand them the form the icr form and you can see here this is a letter from the national archives talking about the american hotel association kind of preparing their associated hotels about what this was going to be happening these people were going to be in the lobby doing all of this and these guys worked hard so they had to stop people in the lobby and say hey did you thought the icr they're on the guest phone calling the rooms they are talking to the staff and so there was a really big effort even with all of that not every person got captured on an icr so what they would do in those cases is they would sit down with the staff with the hotel register and they would fill in that information so here's your tip if you see reg in caps in the 1950 census you're really looking at they didn't talk to your ancestor they got his information or her information from the register of the place where they were staying and again that's discussed in the instructions there's also a couple of new things that came out there was something called the residential survey and this is what it looks like um i don't know a lot about it but i just know that it was for residential financing it was a separate survey that they did in 1950 and it was information collected on a sample basis from owners of owner occupied and rental properties and mortgage lenders so it'll be interesting to see if that surfaces in any way if we're able to get our hands on that and technology was changing too according to the national archives quote the census bureau began use of the first non-military computer shortly after completing the 1950 enumeration it's called univac probably heard of that the universal automatic computer and it was the first of a series was delivered in 1951 and it helped tabulate some of the statistics of the 1954 economic censuses it weighed sixteen thousand pounds it had five thousand vacuum tubes remember when you had to call the tv repairman to come and change the the tubes in your tv oh my gosh i wouldn't wanna be in charge of that uniback okay so to wrap this up i want to tell you five things concrete things that you could be doing right now and over the next year in preparation for the 1950 census in 2022. first of all get into your family tree uh if you have a genealogy software database an online tree go back and review it make a list of those families that you want to look up who fall within 1950. and look for gaps and questions that you might be able to answer based on what you've learned in this hour together on what kind of information is provided you know a good research question we've talked about that here before at our channel is just key to getting good answers so make that list go through take some time to comb through your family tree now you also want to look up for addresses you might have some of those addresses already in your database but if you don't once you've got your list of people now you've got some homework to do we need to go find their address in 1950 it's going to make it so much easier to find the right ed so that you can then find them in the unindexed records even before it gets indexed who wants to wait eight months for or however long it's going to be i don't know how long it's going to be to get the index and the searchability so look at old letters and diaries and journals and scrapbooks and photo albums around your house talk to your relatives maybe they've got an old rolodex or or address book um you can look at vital records the birth marriage and death records might have some addresses maybe where somebody passed away on a death record check the newspaper social security and even make note go back and look at your 1940 census for that family what was the address maybe they didn't move so now you're ready to go you've got names and people and addresses also you can use the one step website that we talked about and once you're armed with these locations and these addresses you're going to ready you're ready to go out and find those enumeration district numbers so you're going to use the tools i've got links very specifically and throughout the show notes with all the details how to and you're going to enter the state and the town where they lived if you have the street address you're going to enter that more specifically in that unified tool and you're going to then get the map and you're going to find that address on the map and remember the drawing the orange lines are the district lines and then there's going to be a big number in there and that's going to tell you what ed number that they are in and i do encourage you to read that essay that's over at stephen morris's website problems with the 1950 ed maps it's going to help save you from some frustration okay and here's what's really important the one step tool includes some maps that are not found at the national archives that's why you need that tool okay it's easier to use but it's also going to get into maps that the national archives doesn't have all right and then we're gonna take some time as you're waiting and go check back and make sure you've filled in the blanks for all the other census records that you should have right now publicly we have 1790 through 1940 and those are available online you can find them at all the the big genealogy websites family search has them has them for free the national archives has them the national archives has a great resource page over at their site and it lists the decennial census and all the associated online resources for it so i've got a link in the show notes to that for you as well and that's going to help you census by senses kind of make determinations where the best place is to find the records and of course for 1940 if you haven't already done it go check out the the enumeration district maps for 1940. i just think they're interesting to have anyway right i love putting those into google earth as a map overlay i talk about that in my book because it's just one more piece of their life and and their context of their life and you can also check out um the 20 tips for i think this is probably six items the 20 the 20 tips for census research at the national archives it's called the history hub and it's a great um article about just general tips for researching in the census so that link my friends is in the show notes where are the show notes one more time we go to genealogygems.com and um you will find typically i will have the picture of the most recent episode on the home page i'll have to check and make sure i got this one on the home page you can always go in the menu to elevenses and on mobile the menu is the three horizontal lines and you click that and then on your phone you'll be able to get to the elevenses menu as well so my goodness gracious we've covered so much who knew that there was so much when it comes to the 1950 census and i know karen well this is actually the 51st episode she mentioned it's the 50th episode um of 11's with lisa and i think that was our week last week i couldn't believe it i it just blew right past me so thank you she says i call it the pandemic blessing at it as it has helped us look forward to something every week it has been a blessing for me as well and uh we'll continue to do it because there's so much to learn and it is so fun to get together with each other right and have our uh our little kappa yeah steve says hey time to pull out those city directories absolutely you guys have a whole checklist of stuff be sure premium members that you go in and you download the pdf of the show notes uh it's really your go-to cheat sheet for this one and um i wanted to mention let's see if this works happy birthday grandma my grandma who lived in the 1950s who was such a card grandma burkett today is her 108th birthday no she's been long gone for a couple of decades but she was my inspiration in many ways and just had it down pat how to just love on a kid and that's what she did for me i hope you have a wonderful week my friend you have lots to do this week we're gonna probably be looking even more in depth at some of the enumeration district maps things you can do with them so stay tuned to the genealogy gems youtube channel because this is where it's going to happen the more i got into this the more i realized i really want to show you this into step by step but i want to show you how to make the overlays we'll be doing that in future videos so will you please do two things click the red subscribe button and tell your friends about the channel share it on facebook let people know oh my gosh we are doing so much over here we want you to join us i hope you will all right well i think that's it for me what have i got here that's it have a wonderful wonderful week i know you will and i'll talk to you soon bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems

Views: 20,266

Rating: 4.9302616 out of 5

Keywords: lisa louise cooke, elevenses with Lisa, genealogy gems, Genealogy podcast, lisa louise cook, family history, free webinar, 1950 cnesus, 1950 census, US Federal Census, national archives, 1950 sensus, one-step, stephen morse, geneology

Id: 87hGRjeZ5o4

Length: 51min 47sec (3107 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021