For American genealogists, today is Census Eve – the 1950 United States Census will be released tomorrow, April 1, 2022. In 1978, Public Law 95-416, also known as the “72-Year Rule,” restricted access to decennial records to everyone except for the individual named on the record for 72 years. Some people are staying up until 12:01 am tonight to be able to jump on the internet as soon as the census is officially released. There may or may not be fireworks. I am not among that group.
The National Archives has been preparing for this launch for the last decade. Right after it launched the 1940 website in 2012, it developed a list of lessons learned and began planning for the scanning of the 1950 Census. It is a good thing they started early, too, because they have had limited access to their buildings during the pandemic. Fortunately, selected staff who have received special clearances to work on these records have scanned the majority of the pages and are also able to work remotely on indexing efforts. Their staff are busy ensuring that state, county, city, and enumeration district metadata will be available at the time of launch.
Volunteers will have a chance to help make the census records more widely available. Ancestry will create an initial automated index using machine learning algorithms and AI handwriting recognition technology.
In past years, thousands of indexing volunteers spent months or even years making census collections searchable. This year, Ancestry's sophisticated artificial intelligence and handwriting recognition technology will save time by creating an initial index from digital census images. While this index won’t be perfect, it will expedite the review and publication process to let us search for your family’s names in the 1950 census sooner after its release.
Volunteers will help review the computer-created index for accuracy. Instead of creating an index from scratch, volunteers helping with the 1950 census indexing will be invited to review the automated index to ensure that every name is included and indexed correctly. A human review will refine the index and help ensure that everyone included in the census can be found.
Neither Family Search nor Ancestry.com nor MyHeritage have provided an exact date for when the census records will be available on their respective websites. However, as with the 1940 census, they expect that the census will be made available on these websites very shortly after the National Archives releases it to the public. Searchable indexes will follow as artificial intelligence and volunteers transcribe record images.
Here are the questions the 1950 Census asked:
Column 1: Street name
Column 2: House number (and apartment number, if applicable)
Column 3: Count of dwellings in the order visited
Column 4: Whether the house was on a farm or ranch
Column 5: Whether property was on a piece of land that was three acres or larger if not a farm or ranch
Column 6: Agricultural schedule number (cross-reference for those who answered yes to questions 4 or 5)
The next several columns were answered by everyone who normally slept in that household (with a few exceptions). Members were to be listed in a specific order, as described in a column header, with the following information:
Column 7: Name, with last name first
Column 8: Relationship to head of household (e.g., wife, son, patient, tenant)
Column 9: Race: W for white, Neg for Black/Negro, Ind for American Indian, Jap for Japanese, Chi for Chinese, Fil for Filipino; other responses were to be spelled out
Column 10: Sex, male (M) or female (F)
Column 11: Age at last birthday as of census taker’s visit; birth month for children less than 1 year old
Column 12: Marital status; Mar for married, Wd for widowed, D for divorced, Sep for separated, and Nev for never married
Column 13: Birthplace (state/territory, foreign country, etc.)
Column 14: Naturalization status if foreign-born; Yes if naturalization finalized or No if it hadn’t; AP for someone born abroad to American parents
Employment Questions
Those age 14 and older responded to additional queries about their employment, with the lineup of questions depending on their response to question 15:
Column 15: Work activity for the week prior; Wk for paid or unpaid work, H for keeping their own house, U for unable to work, Inmate for residents of institutions, Ot for other (including students and the temporarily disabled)
Column 16: If any other work if answered question 15 with H or Ot; a Yes meant they worked at least one hour of qualifying work the week before
Column 17: If looking for work if answered question 16 with No
Column 18: If has a job or own business if answered question 17 with No; a Yes would imply the person had a job but didn’t work “last week” because of illness, vacation, labor disputes, etc.
Column 19: Number of hours worked the previous week
Column 20a: Job title or description for current position
Column 20b: Kind of business or industry in which currently or recently employed
Column 20c: Class of worker; P for private employers, G for government workers, O for self-employed, NP for working without pay for a household farm or business
Supplementary Questions
Every fifth person on the population schedule answered additional “sample” questions at the bottom of the page about their past year’s residence, parents’ origin, and education. Respondents were selected by line number, though which numbers indicating sample responses varied by form. The questions themselves were the same:
Column 21: If living in the same house one year ago
Column 22: If No to question 21, if living on a farm one year ago
Column 23: If No to question 21, if living in the same county one year ago
Column 24: If No to question 23, what county (a) or state/foreign country (b) living one year ago
Column 25: Birthplace(s) of father and mother
Column 26: Highest grade/level of school
Column 27: Whether finished highest grade level
Column 28: If attended school since February 1
Sample respondents over the age of 14 were also asked about weeks worked and income:
Column 29: How many weeks spent looking for work, if any (indicated by question 17)
Column 30: How many weeks worked outside of home in last year
Column 31: Income in last year from (a) wages or salary, i.e., income from an employer; (b) own business or practice; (c) non-earning sources such as investments and pensions
Column 32: Income in last year for whole household if respondent is the head of household
Column 33: Military service if respondent is male, with separate columns for World War II (a), World War I (b) and “any other time” (c)
On each page, one of those sample respondents was asked additional questions if age 14 or older. Question 34 assessed whether those who worked outside the home in the past year (question 30) also responded to questions 20a through 20c about type of work. If they didn’t, they were asked to fill in that information about their most recent job in 35a through 35c. Otherwise, respondents skipped to the remaining questions:
Column 36: If married more than once, if married at all
Column 37: Years since most recent marital status change
Column 38: Number of children borne, not counting stillbirths, if respondent is female and has been married
I’m interested in this census for a number of reasons:
It’s the first census where I’ll appear; I was born in 1947.
I’ll be able to see where my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were living in 1950. I didn’t grow up near them – they were mostly in Arizona (some were in Illinois) and I have questions about who was living where and with whom in 1950. The census will tell me.
I’ll be able to see the names of the people who lived near me in 1950. My parents had just bought a house in a new suburban development in Falls Church, Virginia, and I’m interested in finding out more about our neighbors.
I don’t have a lot of unanswered questions that the 1950 census will be able to answer, but I do have some. I’m looking forward to working with this new information. My genealogy friends in the UK just celebrated the release of the 1921 census there – the laws there require a 100 year waiting period between the census and the year of its release.
I wasn’t doing genealogy when the 1940 Census was released in April of 2012. That was the spring of my last year of teaching; my husband had some health crises, my mother was ill (she died in October of 2012), and I wasn’t interested in this at all.
Things are different now. This is officially A BIG DEAL.
Yippee! But I will be in bed tonight at 12:01.