Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Help FamilySearch index the 1950 census

By Leave a Comment

The 1950 census was released 12 days ago and, as we’ve talked about before, a computer-generated index was available (amazing!). That index was better than nothing, but at least in the case of my people, not particularly helpful.

FamilySearch is looking for volunteers to check the computer index and make corrections so that a robust index will be available. And they’ve made it very easy.

Just go to FamilySearch.org, login and click on “Start Now in the Help Review the 1950 Census Index” banner. You’ll get to select a state (currently, the state list is limited), then you’ll click Get Started. I selected Oregon and was offered the opportunity to Review Families. In the next screen, I could enter a surname if I wanted. If you do that, you’ll be presented with pages with that surname, as well as other entries. Then you review and correct each line of the page.

I find this a fun and rewarding volunteer opportunity and I’m so happy that FamilySearch has made it so easy. The volunteer effort will make an accurate index available all the sooner!

 

1950 Census clue: Sheet 71 and up

By 2 Comments

I spent the day with the 1950 U.S. Census on April 1, as anticipated, and I was bleary eyed (and brain dead) by afternoon. But I had a great time. When I found my teenage mother (who passed away in 2015) on the census living with her parents and little brother, I got goose bumps.

I had done a pretty good job of finding enumeration districts (EDs) in advance, which was good, since the search function worked for just one of my people. I had the joy of finding my grandparents when I wasn’t looking for them. (I was looking for my aunt, who was married and in her own home by then and just stumbled upon my grandparents.)

On April 1, I found father (in his fraternity house at Whitman College), my mother living with her parents and grandmother, my paternal grandparents, and two sets of great grandparents. I didn’t find my aunt (my father’s sister, who is still living) though I browsed the EDs I thought she might be living in page by painstaking page. And I also searched in vain for my father’s paternal grandmother. (I’m determined to keep looking!) I’ve processed the documents I found, but I haven’t had a chance to do much more looking. I’m excited to get back to it.

If you’re like me, you’ve seen a lot of “No One At Home” entries on the pages you were looking at. I wanted to share a tip I learned only after I had done all that browsing. For every enumeration district, no matter how many sheets it has, the names of those folks who were re-canvassed after not being at home starts on Sheet 71. An ED might have 30 pages to browse, but it might skip from sheet 26 to sheet 71. So if you find your person’s address and it says No One At Home, I suggest you skip to sheet 71 (and beyond) to if they’re there. (And take comfort in knowing that sheets 26 to 70 in this example aren’t missing.)

I’m going to go back to some of the EDs I browsed looking for my aunt and great grandmother and make sure I pay especially close attention to Sheet 71 and up. I was pretty bleary eyed by the last pages of any ED and I’m hopeful perhaps I just missed them.

If you’d like to read more detail about how enumerators were instructed to handle No One At Home, check out this detailed blog post from the History Hub, the National Archives’ crowdsourced platform: 1950 Census: Enumerated Out-of-Order – “Callbacks” and Others on Page 71 and Up.

Happy hunting!

The bright side of the backlog

By 2 Comments

I often post here about having a backlog of documents that I need to deal with. When I get on a roll, I tend to download documents willy nilly, rather than pausing to process each one before downloading another. I do always rename the file as soon as I download it and put it in my Surnames folder. That list of unprocessed documents used to stress me out or at the very least make me feel like a bad genealogist.

Before I focused on my backlog during the January 30 x 30 challenge, I had 88 documents to process! (By process, I mean extracting facts from the document, entering them into my database on Reunion and creating a source citation that is used for each fact.)

By the end of the January 30 x 30 challenge (well, actually by the first week in February), my backlog was gone. And since then I’ve been focusing on watching RootsTech classes and prepping for the 1950 census release, so I haven’t been adding to the backlog since then.

It felt great to clear out the backlog. But I realized something that surprised me: I kind of miss my backlog. What? Here’s the bright side to having a letting documents pile up. When I have a backlog, I always have a mini-genealogy project at the ready. I just pick a document and process it. (I actually enjoying processing documents, so it’s not a hardship.) I don’t have to figure out what/who I want to research in a given session.

Now that I have no backlog, I have to get focused on some research questions. Weirdly, I feel a little like I’m starting from scratch.

So here’s what I decided today: I’m going to allow myself to build a backlog of up to ten documents without feeling guilty about it. But when I hit ten, I will stop looking for more and start processing what I have. I’m calling it the Rule of Ten. I imagine there will be times when I have more than ten in a given session. But I will whittle it down to below ten in the next one.

This feels really good to me and I can’t wait to see if it works out well!

Quick Tips #34: Brainstorm variations of your ancestors’ names

By Leave a Comment

Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. This one might be helpful when you dive into the 1950 census.

Brainstorm variations of your ancestors’ names

With the release of the 1950 U.S. census less than two weeks away, now seems like a good time to suggest that you take a moment to come up with alternative ways your ancestors’ names may have been spelled–or interpreted by indexers–on documents. Once you have your list, you can use the different variants when searching at the various online site, like Ancestry, Family Search, the NARA 1950 census site, MyHeritage, and Newspapers.com.

Variations might include:

  • First and middle names
  • Initials in place of first name
  • First initial, middle name
  • Phonetic spellings
  • Possible misinterpretations of handwritten letters — I talk about this in my blog post, Sometimes you gotta browse.

If you’re compiling your list of ancestors to look for on the 1950 census, it might be smart to add these variations–then hang on to them for future searches.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash