Now, 72 years later, these unredacted and personally identifiable census responses are available to anyone and can be viewed. On April 1 of this year, the National Archives made available on its website digital images of every response from the 1950 census, amounting to more than 165 terabytes of data.

Unlike other census data products, the 72-year-old versions offer a more personal look at the American people and life in the post-war era. These are not statistical summaries or demographic analyses, but details of individual lives that can now serve as entry points for research into family histories and social inequalities.

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And unlike other 72-year-old versions, this one stands out for how quickly many documents were indexed or made searchable by computers. Using techniques such as optical character recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), the National Archives was able to transform millions of handwritten census responses into searchable text on the day the records were released.

For previous versions, this type of word processing required months of work, financial and technological investments from private companies like Ancestry, and the cooperative efforts of thousands of volunteers.

This new technological approach to the National Archives, the legal repository of records, will speed up the research process and make records more widely available to the public than at any time in the past. But the technology is not perfect. Sloppy handwriting, misspellings, and masked letters prevent the AI ​​from producing accurate results for all entries. Until a full index of names can be completed this summer, finding the right record will still require amateur detective work.

Family research

Tonia Wood, senior reference archivist for the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC), advises researchers to start with everything they already know about their families. “Write down the details you remember and talk to family members to fill in the gaps,” Wood said.

Websites like FamilySearch and Find A Grave can confirm or refine names, important dates, and general places where the family lived, all helpful in approaching the search.

“Libraries in the area of ​​interest may have more local collections and can help with search strategies and information that may not be readily available online.”

The San Antonio Genealogical and Historical Society is one such library.

Linda Grover, the Society’s librarian, says city directories are useful for linking a name to an address. “We have city directories for 48 cities and towns in Texas, and a few outside of Texas.”

The Society, a non-profit organization located in the Greater Harmony Hills, offers an extensive collection of materials and educational programs to enhance members’ research skills and help them learn more about their family history.

Interest in genealogy has grown steadily in recent years. Wood credits the increased availability of online resources like the National Archives and TSLAC. “As more and more resources are digitized and made available online by libraries and archives, visiting a physical library is no longer as necessary when remote access options are available.”

Online resources can allow individuals to research their family histories whenever they have a spare moment, Wood added.

Barbara Holmes, assistant president for education for SAGHS, cautioned against relying on online resources as the only way to get a full picture of her family’s history.

“What’s digitized is just the tip of the iceberg,” Holmes said. “There is so much that is not digitized and may never be. So it is always important to go to libraries, archives and courthouses. People cannot sit home and use their computer.”

Social research

In addition to providing residents with new ways to find people both familiar and famous, the 72-year-old census data offers scientists and researchers opportunities to understand communities in detail that few other sets. of data provide.

Cathy Fitch, associate director of the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation at the University of Minnesota, said the big advantage is that this data is a total count of everyone, not just an estimate based on a sample. Population. With complete enumeration, new ways of looking at neighborhoods and places become possible and allow in-depth analysis of small-scale geographic areas that a one percent sample of the population does not allow.

Fitch says having names linked to addresses will allow researchers to focus on location-based health outcomes. “I think people are going to start looking at air pollution and proximity to roads and highways and things like that,”

Lead levels in drinking water and the effects it can have on residents of a neighborhood will be another important topic that researchers could start digging into.

“By looking at the pH level in water supplies, assuming all pipes are lead, you can guess where more or less lead would seep into the water.” Fitch said these data allow researchers to study links between lead exposure and later life outcomes such as education level and income.

The latest versions of the 72-year-old censuses have been used by researchers to study topics such as racial segregation in residential neighborhoods and infant mortality in immigrant populations.

Step by step instructions

Finding a specific person in the 1950 census is a little more complicated than doing a simple Google search. To help readers with their family (or celebrity) searches, we’ve created this step-by-step visual guide to help you find the right name.

To get started, go to 1950census.archives.gov and click Start Search.

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Select the state and city and/or county you’re searching in, then enter a name. The website will search the names independently, so if you search for “John Smith” it will return listings for “John” and “Smith”. Unique names will be easier to find than common names, although misspellings and sloppy handwriting that make the form difficult to read will cause problems for the machine that transcribes the written form into searchable text.

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The more information you have, the better. And the most reliable information you can have is a mailing address. But the website does not have an address search function. To do this, you will need to know the enumeration district that contains the address you are looking for.

An enumeration district was an area that a census taker could completely cover within a specified time: two weeks in cities and four weeks in rural areas. They were created using existing maps that provided block-by-block detail, such as postal route maps, land survey maps, maps produced by government offices, or maps from commercial printers . Census officials then drew enumeration area boundaries and numbers on these base maps in orange pencil. Scans of these maps are available by clicking on the ED Maps link on the website.

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From this button you will get a window with the selected city and county maps. Pick one and zoom in to find the approximate location of the subject’s address.

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If you don’t have an address, don’t worry! Identifying characteristics such as the names of other people in the household could help find the correct entry. But patience is needed when it comes to sorting out handwritten response scans. It’s not an exact science.