What is April 1, 2022? No, I’m not thinking about April Fool’s Day. It is the day that the 1950 US census will be released. It was microfilmed a long time ago and has already been digitized from that microfilm. After having been confidential for 72 years it will be widely available just a little over 4 moths from now. It will be on the US Census website, Ancestry.com, FamilySearch and probably other websites that first day.
What won’t be available at that time? Any indexes. When we got the release of the 1940 census it took Ancestry 4 months to index all the records. They used indexers in India. FamilySearch finished in 5 months using volunteers to index the records.
The graphic that I used is the header from a population sheet. To see what a whole page looks like you can view or download this blank page. Note that there 30 people recorded per page and that 6 have extra questions that they replied to on the bottom of the page.
A few genealogy blogs have what to expect from the 1950 census. Lisa Cooke has two videos that you can watch to give you the basis information of the 1950:
That second video gives much more details on how to find an Election District (ED) map based on where a family lived in 1950. Then you can narrow down your task of looking through the pages before they end up being indexed.
I did a map search for my parents. I knew the exact address where they lived in 1950. Now I will only have to look through 10 or 20 pages to find their record. In their household is a baby; me. I was born in 1949 so I will be in this census. It will be the only census where our complete family is listed together. My sister was 12 years older than me and she go married and moved out in 1955.
If you don’t have an address for your family in 1950 then you will have to wait until the records are indexed. There are rumors that both Ancestry and FamilySearch have systems that might be able to do character recognition indexing. Handwriting is very difficult for computers to interpret. We have to wait and see if those systems work. Either way, it will be a big race to see what website gets what records indexed first.
Dick, I’ve been counting down the days until April 1st. I’m going to see my name in that census as I was born in 1948. I can’t wait to get a lot of questions answered. Thank you for sending these links.