Preparing for the 1950 Census

I’ve had April 1, 2022–the year that the 1950 census is made public–on my calendar for ages. But that distant day started to feel real when I attended the terrific webinar “Get Ready for the 1950 US Census!” presented by Marian B. Wood for the Kentucky Genealogical Society last night.

To be honest, I hadn’t thought much about all the things I could do to prepare for the census release in advance. But now I’m very excited to get to work so that on April 1 I can find my people on the census easily.

Here are some of my takeaways from the seminar. You can bet I’ll be blogging more about it!

• The National Archives announced a few days ago that it is going to use artificial intelligence and optical character recognition to create a (probably crude) surnames index available on April 1. They’re also spearheading a public transcription effort. Check out their news release about it.
• I’m not going to count on that index and instead intend to look for the Enumeration Districts for my ancestors so that I can browse the 1950 Census with ease. Marian Wood suggested creating a spreadsheet of ancestors, their 1940 addresses, their 1950 addresses and the corresponding Enumeration Districts. I can’t wait to dig into that.
• To find the Enumeration District for an address, go to Steve Morse’s website to search the Unified Census ED Finder. Marian Wood suggested using Google Maps to narrow down the intersection and thus the number of Enumerations Districts you have to browse. I remember doing this for the 1940 Census but I’m looking forward to preparing in advance this time.
• There’s a public Facebook group called 1950 US Census for Genealogists that will share resources about the 1950 census. I’ve joined and look for keeping an eye on the news there. It already has some great resources listed.
• FamilySearch has created a landing page for the 1950 Census where you can sign up for updates.

In the webinar, we learned about some of the questions asked on this census and the instructions enumerators were given in recording the answers. Hidden assumptions were revealed! I’ll blog more about it later.

The release of the 1950 census is a big deal for those of us in the United States. I can’t wait to see the snapshots of my ancestors’ lives it reveals.