I’ve been indexing and searching the 1940 index since Monday. I’m sure plenty of you have too. For me, I wasn’t in a huge rush to see the images because obviously it’s another 10 years before another census is released. However, I was still excited to see the images! So I tried first thing and of course, there was an overload. As a website designer I’m very familiar with website overloads and slowed servers. So I was a bit disappointed in that, but decided to just try again on Tuesday.
The images are going up in many different places, the official 1940 US Census site, Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, and My Heritage. There are probably more, but those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. For me, I’ve been mostly using the My Heritage site. It works best for my needs and it’s been super fast. Even in full screen view. So because of that I’ve been able to find all my grandparents and Great Grandparents in the 1940 Census already. Which is what I was hoping to find most. I’ve got some more generations in certain (more rural) parts of the country, but for now I’m just going to share my Grandparents and Great-Grandparents.
Database Links: William L Moore, Llewellyn Thorward-Moore
database link: Clifford Herbert Redford
database link: Jane Parkin-Redford, Florence Redford
My grandma actually was picked for the additional questions. Nothing new learned, but it feels like a win for some reason! She’s not the only one who got picked. I have a few more.
database link: William H Mays, Iva Belle Moyer-Mays, Stanley Mays
Interesting enough, the mysterious Ralph Mays was picked for the additional questions. Ralph has always been a special family member. I’ll have to write a post about that sometime.
database link: none, they haven’t been added to the website database yet
This is the most interesting because I wasn’t looking for my Grandma Emogene and her parents here. I had actually looked for them in Bracken and Pendleton Counties in Kentucky first, but didn’t find them where I thought they were (or the usual folks to be honest). So I was looking for Moyers in the Washington township area of Clermont County, Ohio. To my surprise, BAM, there was the Taylors, in the midst of where I usually find Moyers. I knew the family must have eventually moved to Ohio, otherwise how would Grandma Emogene have met Grandpa Stanley? However, I didn’t know she was as young as she was when they moved. It really puts things into a new light. So now I have new questions about them:
- Why did they move between 1935 and 1940?
- Where did the other Taylors disappear to in 1940? I didn’t see them either.
So there you go! That’s all my Grandparents and Great-Grandparents.
Here’s a cheat sheet for anyone who is interested but doesn’t have my family tree memorized. (I don’t know why you would but I wanted to say that. ha) The checks stand for those that I’ve found and the red circles with the line through them are for people who were deceased before the census was taken. I don’t have exact death dates for a lot of my mother’s Mays side, but their birth dates were in the early 1800’s so it’s a common sense judgement call on my part.
I want to thank the US Census Bureau, The National Archives, FamilySearch, and My Heritage for all the hours of entertainment and research they’ve given me this week! I was on a bit of a vacation so it was destiny I guess that everything worked out where I could devote so much time to indexing and researching!