Hooray! The 1950 census has been released by the National Archives. See our earlier post. For many of us, it will be the first census we will be enumerated. I was 1 year old. Initially the census will not have a name index, until many volunteers work on transcribing the names. This process will probably take 2-3 months. In the meantime, there is a way to find your family.
First, you need to know where they live. What is their address? Even though you might not have this information there are ways to figure it out. Family members might know. Some ancestors did not move from the home they inhabited in 1940, so check your 1940 census.
Did you grandparents or parents live in the same house for many years? The City Directory was the precursor to the telephone books most of us are familiar with. The City Directory will have addresses of residences. Ancestry has many city directories for lots of big cities which sometimes include rural areas as well.
Check marriage records that you might have, the address might be on those records. Death certificates sometimes have home addresses on them, too. I have many funeral home records for ancestors who have died and those definitely have home addresses. Work records, military records are also valuable sources of addresses.
So once you have the address, where next? You now need to convert the address to an enumeration district (ED). Those are areas of the county and city divided into districts to enable the census enumerator to visit each home for their count. Big cities will have many districts, sometimes as many as 50, smaller towns might only have 3 or 4. How do we figure out which enumeration district our ancestor lived in?
There is a great website SteveMorse where you can convert your address to a district. There are several boxes with drop down menus, starting with state, county and then city. Your city might not be listed, then use “other”. If you input a big city, such as Kansas City, you will need to enter the house number and the street.
After you have entered that information, the listing of ED will show. Then what??
Go to National Archives website. In middle of the page is 1950 census. Click on it. Next click on 1950census.archives.org tab which will take you to the 1950 search button, click there and you are on the search site for 1950 census. (Ancestry and Family Search have downloaded the census, but I have only used the NARA site).
Now enter the state in drop down menu. In the county space, enter the county from drop down menu. There are a few differences here. A few examples: for Kansas City, Missouri (Jackson county), you will find Kansas City/Jackson. Asheville, North Carolina has Asheville/Buncombe, etc for bigger cities. If you just use the county, your ED numbers will not work and you will get a message “no records found.”
Be sure to look at the whole drop down menu to see if your city is listed with the county. Then enter the ED, such as 54-32, etc. You can enter the last name of your ancestor, but don’t count on that populating your search. NARA has used optical recognition for the names and it is not 100% foolproof. I have found that I am searching the whole district most of the time to find my people.
The ED will show on the right hand side of the page. Click on Population Schedule button and the pages of that district will show. There are many homes listed with “no one at home.” Those people are counted at the end in the last few pages of the district. I have found 3 or 4 of my own family members there. Be sure to check the last few pages.
It is a slow, tedious process to search the ED, but it is worth the effort to find your family member or perhaps yourself! You can wait 3 or 4 months for the manual name indexing to be completed from Ancestry or Family Search. I am not that patient!
There are several sites where you can obtain blank 1950 census forms so you can write down your information to save for later reference.
Good luck! It is worth the effort and time.
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