In just over a week the 1950 US census  will be released. It will happen at midnight on April first. It will be released by the National Archives (NARA) on a separate website. So far that web address hasn’t been released.

NARA scanned the images from microfilm that they have had for many years. Hopefully they did a good job on the microfilm as when they filmed the pages they threw out the original books. So if a page is out of focus there will be no way to go back and film it again.

When the 1940 census was released the big genealogy companies got all the images on a hard drive. This time they will be able to download all the images. But not only will they be able to download the images but you or I can also download the whole image set. How big would that be? It will probably be many terabytes.

NARA says that Americans living abroad were not enumerated in 1950 unless living in a US territory (Canal Zone, Guam, etc.).

At the same time that NARA releases the census they will also have a name index. They have used an optical character recognition  (OCR) program from Amazon to create that index. No OCR program is 100% correct at figuring out typed letters on a page and handwriting is even more difficult to figure out. You will be able to make corrections to the NARA index.

FamilySearch and Ancestry are teaming together for the 1950 census release. Ancestry says they have an OCR program that will be able to index ALL fields on a census page. No telling how long it will take to do the OCR. I suspect it may be leas than a week. Ancestry has said that their OCR is 98% accurate on “yes” or “no” columns but only 60% on any names.

Both FamilySearch and Ancestry will have ways to make corrections on all the field within a record. FamilySearch is saying that you could make corrections to a whole page or even make corrections to a single surname; that is, I could just do corrections on all Halsey families in the US. They will then, every so often, send the corrections made on one system to the other. So you can make your corrections on whichever of the two websites you feel most comfortable on.

MyHeritage is saying that will be doing indexing as soon as possible. It appears that they also will try to index most or all fields. They aren’t saying if they are using OCR or overseas indexers.They also haven’t said if you will be able to make corrections but I suspect they will. After all a better index benefits them in the end.

If you were around for the release of the 1940 census in 2012, you know that will be a big race to see which company can get records out first and have the most accurate index.

There will be those families that have something that you never knew before. And maybe a few of your families got skipped by the census enumerator. Still this is going be to great fun for all genealogy researchers.