Newly Released 1950 Census Data Gives Public Insight Into Family Status, US History
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6 comments
Compared with other years, this census is not really dense with information useful to a genealogist. Only one out of five persons were asked where their parents were born. In many cases those lines corresponded to a child in a family where that information is already given. In some earlier census schedules, this question applied to all. I believe that this was the last census that asked if foreign born residents were citizens. Apparently you can’t ask that anymore.
One of my favorite questions was in the 1930 Census, asking whether anyone in the household had a radio set.
Among the 1950 “sample” questions were highest grade completed and If male: Did he ever serve in the US Armed forces during: World War II, World War I, any other time including present service.
I wish everybody had been asked those questions.
I found my grandparents because I knew where they lived. I had to do some significant guessing to find my folks. They were on two different census forms, even though they were only a six-minute walk from each other. I will be very happy once Ancestry.com gets the 1950 census indexed. And I hope that I live long enough to find my name on a census record.
You can help index the 1950 Census through the project at Family Search (https://www.familysearch.org/1950census/). I don’t have any plans to help with this one but I have indexed thousands of their other, mostly German, records.
… interesting I only found a few relatives… my guess is back then people avoided the “revenuers” … lack of trust over what the data would be used for? – or something else maybe
I’m currently “indexing” the 1950 Census. It was “read” by a computer and then checked by people. It’s a good thing we are checking it, I don’t think computers know how to read handwriting very well. There are many corrections that need to be made.
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