{"id":3797,"date":"2022-04-03T02:43:23","date_gmt":"2022-04-03T02:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linksus.net\/1950-census-data-released-a-trove-for-genealogists-the-washington-post\/"},"modified":"2022-04-03T02:43:23","modified_gmt":"2022-04-03T02:43:23","slug":"1950-census-data-released-a-trove-for-genealogists-the-washington-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/2022\/04\/03\/1950-census-data-released-a-trove-for-genealogists-the-washington-post\/","title":{"rendered":"1950 Census data released, a trove for genealogists. – The Washington Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the private data from the 1950 Census was finally unveiled early Friday, David Ferriero, the head of the National Archives, logged onto the Archives website to search for his family.
He found Beverly, Mass., the coastal town north of Boston where he grew up, and the address on Walnut Avenue, where he had lived.
And there, listed as head of the household, was his father, Anthony P. Ferriero, then 40, an auto mechanic who the Census said had worked 64 hours the previous week at a local garage.
There, too, were his mother, Marie, 32, his brother, Anthony C., 11, his sisters, Marie A., 9, and Kathleen, 2, and four-year old David, himself, who is now 76. It was the first Census in which he appeared, he said in a blog post Friday.
Ferriero was among thousands of Americans who began searching the 6.4 million digitized pages of personal 1950 Census records released by the Archives <\/a>at 12:01 a.m. Friday.
The data, which had been kept secret to protect privacy for 72 years, was a trove for genealogists.
\u201cI haven\u2019t gone to sleep yet,\u201d Stephen P. Morse, an amateur genealogist and computer expert in San Francisco, said Friday afternoon. \u201cI\u2019ve been up all night.\u201d
On Saturday, April 1, 1950, an army of 140,000 census enumerators had started out across the country to interview the roughly 151 million residents in 46 million households.
The data they collected includes names, ages, addresses and answers to questions they asked about employment status, job description and income.
Women were asked, if married, how many children they had borne. People were asked where they worked, where their parents were born, how much money they made <\/b>and how much money relatives in the home made.
Next door to the Ferrieros on Walnut Avenue, were the Gardners, Norman, 43, his wife, Norma, 46, and their son, David, 16. Norman was a meter technician in a shoe machine factory, the Census enumerator reported.
Elsewhere on Walnut Avenue were Gertrude Shattuck, 39, a secretary for a car insurance firm, Charles H. Perkins, 63, an order clerk at a factory, and Oswald Evitts, 64, a machinist at a power plant.
They were all part of the giant national snapshot.
And along with Ferriero, an estimated 26 million Americans living in the country in 1950 are still alive.
Morse, the genealogist, said he found his family in the data at about 3 a.m. Friday. They were in a second-floor rear apartment at 85 Newport Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. His father, Morris, was an accountant.
\u201cI really wanted to find this because it\u2019s the only census where my entire family, the whole grouping, is together,\u201d he said. \u201cMy mother, my father, my sister, myself and my grandmother.\u201d
\u201cIt was exciting,\u201d he said. \u201cA nice thing to put into my genealogy scrap book.\u201d
Now 81, he was 9 when the enumerator visited in 1950.
The 1950 Census was the nation\u2019s 17th. It has been conducted every 10 years since 1790, by order of the Constitution.
Enumerators were sent to visit people wherever they lived or were staying \u2014 homes, apartments, hotels, Indian reservations, boats, tents and railroad cars.
Native Americans on reservations were asked on a separate form if they were \u201cfull blood, half to full, quarter to half, less than \u00bc.\u201d They were also asked if in 1949 they had participated in or attended \u201cany native Indian ceremonies.\u201d
\u201cWhat many people don\u2019t know is that the census is particularly important to Indian tribes,\u201d Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe, said in one of the prerecorded announcements that helped launch the release.
\u201cBecause it helps decide federal funding, which then impacts the government\u2019s responsibility to native communities,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Alvin Thornton, 73, of Upper Marlboro, Md., had seen the 1870 Census, which recorded his great-grandparents, who were born into slavery.
He found his grandmother and his mother and father in later surveys. But Friday was the first day that Thornton, a professor emeritus and former chair of the political science department at Howard University, was able to search for himself.
On April 1, 1950, he was 1-and-a-half, the youngest of seven children living in a four-room wooden house in Rock Mills, Alabama.
\u201cA typical, rural, what we call a sharecropper\u2019s home,\u201d he said of the structure, which was owned by a white landlord who also owned the land and equipment his father used to grow cotton. \u201cThe home would certainly have had no inside running water, no inside toilets, or anything like that.\u201d
Three years later, when his father got a job at a cotton mill, his family moved, and in 1971 Thornton moved to the Washington area.
On Friday, he was online, looking for the form that would have listed himself and his older siblings (three more were born who won\u2019t appear until the 1960 Census), along with his wife. \u201cI started searching, and my search engine is not picking me up right now,\u201d he said.
Eventually, he said, he found himself and his family in the records.
Hamil R. Harris contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the private data from the 1950 Census was finally unveiled early Friday, David Ferriero, the head of the National Archives, logged onto the Archives website to search for his family.He found Beverly, Mass., the coastal town north of Boston where he grew up, and the address on Walnut Avenue, where he had lived.And there, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":869,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3797"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/869"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}