Do you need the street number as well? I know what street both grandparents and greatparents lived but not the house number. I know the town my parents lived in but not the street.

So now I just spent a couple of hours finding out that I really do exist! It was fun seeing the neighbors' names, people that I had completely forgotten about.

I gave up last night. I got what I believe is the correct Enumeration District & my city's 1940 map (which was itself interesting),but got no further. No great hurry I guess, though from reading some of the "comments", some people were greatly annoyed that they couldn't access IMMEDIATELY or that there wasn't a Name Index---after all, the Census Bureau "had 72 years to do do so", blah, blah, blah. (I realize the CB is not charged with indexing; these dopes don't).

Interesting about the discrepancy in your mother's age. Wonder what it was in the 1930 Census? I recently did some genealogy background on a family where the wife was the correct age through several censuses until she married, then she became 7 years younger, which coincidentally was exactly her new husband's age.

I recall reading at some site re the 1940 Census that it indicates which family person actually gave the information to the census taker.

It took awhile but I finally found the right enumeration number and scrolled through 38 pages to get to the image I wanted. I'm doing house research rather than family research and I learned somethings about the family who lived here in the 1940s, including their occupation, salaries, etc. Every little bit of information helps!

They didn't make it easy. It was by wards but I found my maternal grandparents and aunt. GF was 56 and a foreman of a construction company, G-ma was 62 and aunt was 22. She's now 94. They owned their own house at $8,000 which was sadly torn down about five years ago to make a parking lot for the church next door. Neither graduated from HS,but my aunt did. My paternal GPs should have been in that ward too as well as my great grandparents who were alive then. I don't know the name of the street where my parents lived though.

lily316 - I didn't need the exact address of the house, although I knew it. The listings I saw were by street name and did ask for the nearest cross street, if known. There were 18 pages of entries for my street, which was not terribly long. The are listed by the numerical street address, though.

It seems apparent that the entries were all transferred onto the page by the same hand, so I imagine it was fairly easy to make an incorrect entry, as in my mother's age. Still very interesting.

I tried , I know my mother's address in 1940 and my father's street. I got a one-page document listing the wards and some streets, but no addresses or names. I'll give it another try. By the way, I read that "volunteers" are currently working to make the list accessible by names.

jannine, the one-page document you got is the one that will give you the enumeration number. Go back to it, get the number, and then return to the search site and type it in. You'll get a result, and at the top of that result there is a menu of three options. The right hand option is the one that will display the actual cenuss page images: it says something confusing like "census schedules." On the images you'll find the street names and then the houses arranged by numbers.

I was told to give a cross street but forgot any. When I came upon a cousin and parents, I knew they didn't live on the street my grandparents did. So tonight I'll try to find my parents. I know about where they lived in the same town but not the address.I'll also try to find Paternal GPs and great grand parents , all living in the south end of town.

Thank-you Lindsey for the behind the scenes tour. Thanks for the work you do!
I wasn't able to access the 1940 census the 1st day so I tried the 1940 substitute on Ancestry(mostly city directories) and found a wealth of information on my husband's family in the Albany area. Amazing!

Maxmom, I do have addresses for my grandparents and great-grandparents at that time, and will try to find the information from that census.

Lindsey, how cool that you have been helping with this!

Do you have to pay for Ancestry.com? The census takers in the 40's messed up every spelling of every name in our family. They weren't difficult names: Sara for Sarah, Edward for Edwin and the last name was differently spelled.

Unless Ancestry's WW Deluxe Membership is a lot less than $1. a day, that seems kind of expensive. I use Ancestry's Public Library membership which is rather basic, but free, & then occasionally supplement it by going to a LDS Family Life Center, which is about a mile from my house. I've found emailing public libraries for microfilmed newspaper & city directory info to be the most helpful in genenology searching outside of paid commercial sites. The RAOGK site & volunteers were often very helpful, but since the lady that started it & ran it for years died last year, I guess it's gone kapoot. Anyway, lots of other sources beyond Ancestry.

"Unless Ancestry's WW Deluxe Membership is a lot less than $1. a day, that seems kind of expensive."

What is considered to be expensive is relative, I guess. If my household income were a whole lot less than it is, I suppose I'd think that $0.80 per day to have 24/7 access to everything on Ancestry.com is expensive. But it's how I choose to spend some of my disposable income. YMMV.

And, I don't do genealogy research just for myself. I've helped 3 folks here at the KT gain entry to Daughters of the American Revolution by finding the proof they needed to be admitted. A coworker of mine handed me a sheet of paper one day that had less than a dozen names on it; some with birth and/or death dates, most without. For location it said only "Massachusetts." Right now I have 996 names on her family tree, and the oldest birth date for which I can find documentation is from 1660. A coworker of my husband's asked him one day a few months ago if I could find out anything about his father's family. All he could provide was his father's name and the state where he was born. His father had died when he was just a child and his mother never talked about him, so that's all he knew. Right now I have 122 names on his father's side of the tree, going back to 1800. Also, I have a web site with my husband's and my genealogy information. I received an e-mail one day from a guy who lives in New Jersey (I'm in California) who had found my site when doing a Google search on a specific surname. That surname is in his family tree as well as mine. Plus, his ancestor with that surname came from the same little town in Italy where my grandfather was born. My great-grandmother's surname is the one this guy had searched. I started out with one name from him, and now have 419 names on his tree. And, I was even able to give him a .jpg of his grandfather's birth record from that little Italian town. I've also helped several other folks from here at the KT find some info they were looking for.

No, I've never charged anyone anything for doing research for them. I love doing genealogy research, and I do it as often as I can. I do work full time and often work overtime (I'm an Active Directory administrator for a state agency), and my husband and I go on vacations, etc. If I could devote myself full time to genealogy research - wow - that would be fun!

I developed a keen interest in genealogy well before Ancestry...spent hours in my nearest LDS Family History Center, going through microfiche. And traveling to county seats to go through archives of birth and marriage records.

It's real mystery game, and addictive.

Imagine going to a page in a book that was written 100 years ago, and seeing the handwritten entry of your grandmother's birth. Then, calling your mother and telling her that her mother used the wrong middle name (Agnes) instead of her legal middle name - Alice !

When Ancestry was created, I signed up right away, have belonged ever since, and it's like having all those Family History Centers, church and state government records available in your home --- with a search engine instead of reading microfiche.

When a new census is released, like this year....it's the "raw" data. And the last few days brought me back to the old days of reading pages of microfiche. It's almost fun.

It will takes months, even years to completely put this raw data into databases for the search engine.

As to spelling and other errors, you have to understand that the information was taken by volunteers or temporary workers hired off the street, who wrote the information by hand, and, in 1940, often had to try to understand foreign accents from European war refugees and immigrants who barely spoke English, and relied on memory(or guess) of statistics like DOB and where parents were born.

Thank you, Lindsay...and all the people who are helping Ancestry do this.

One of the family members I was researching was listed as working at "Sosh and Dorr Company." I realized later that this was a "sash and door" company!

Having all these scattered records available online is marvelous. IMO it's extremely INexpensive, largely thanks to *armies* of volunteers, past and present. Some were not very accurate. Volunteers like Lindsey are a blessing! I'm impressed with the fact-checking process she described.

I've had a 'cousin' experience similar to Lindsey's while I was poking about in my very disorganized way. Most of my 'Frenchies' have unusual surnames (not so much my Scots). Years ago, when the internet was a lot newer, I sent a note to the sole email address in France that was listed under one of 'my' surnames. My mangled French note brought a response in perfect English from a teenager, referring me to write to his grandfather. Grandfather still resided in the area from which my family emigrated in the early 1800's. (This involved a lot of time with French-English dictionaries.) His knowlege of his own family tree back to the late 1600's showed that he and I were at least double-cousins. Along the way I learned a lot about the history of this bit of land along the French-Swiss border. The land has been fought over for centuries -- including WWI, when one of my relatives passed through our ancestral hometown as a soldier, his French surname recognized by the locals.

*Someday* I will start a real family tree -- when I stop spending too much time here at KT. I am DAR-eligible, but have never been as interested in joining anything as in just discovering who was where in history. Genealogy makes dry historical fact come ALIVE!

After emailing a cousin to find our grandparents street number for the 1940 census I was looking at, he emailed me back not that info but a more startling bit. All my life I thought I was 100% Germans as I had seen genealogy reports from both German sides of the family. This cousin believed the same until he further researched and found that our family came from Bern, Switzerland and left because of religious persecution. They were Anabaptist, and one of our "greats" was the first Mennonite pastor of the county we all were born in here in PA.

Lily -- You and I may have ancestors in common. LOL My French Protesstant immigrants to Cincinnati had ancestors who had come to France from Bern.

Thanks for all of the kind words about my volunteer work with Ancestry.com. I do it because I love it, and it's my way of sort of "paying back" (or is it "paying it forward") all the folks who entered all of the information that I've gotten from the site.

By the way, you don't have to be a "volunteer data entry person" or an arbitrator to submit corrections when you see mistakes (yes, mistakes do get through - the system isn't perfect). When you're looking at the information, there is a box on the upper part of the left side of the screen, and one of the links within that box is to submit alternate information. When you submit it, you generally have a choice (drop-down menu choices) to indicate whether there was an error in transcription, or if the information on the image is incorrect, or if it's simply alternate information - like a nickname or a maiden name for a woman who is shown under her married name, etc. Those submissions are then reviewed by "CCC Reviewers" who decide whether to accept the submission or leave the index the way it was. Yes, I'm also a CCC Reviewer for Ancestry.com. :-)

When I say that the system isn't perfect, here's an example of what I mean... I was doing an arbitration review the other day of some pages from Ohio. As I've said previously, if both folks who key in the information have keyed in the exact same thing, it automatically passes. The arbitrator steps in when there is a discrepancy between the two entries. So, the pages I was reviewing were all in the same "set." A set can have a variety of number of pages, depending on what you're entering/reviewing. Even if there aren't any discrepancies on a page, it still goes to the arbitrator as part of the set. Well, on this one particular page there weren't any discrepancies indicated, but I was still looking at the typed entries and comparing them to the handwritten information on the image. I came to an entry where the given name of the head of household had been typed by both keyers as "Elizah." Well, that's how the name is pronounced, but I've personally never seen it written that way. That's not to say that no one has ever spelled it that way -- it's just that I've not seen it. So, I looked at the image, and the handwriting very clearly showed it as "Elijah." So, it's a transcription error. But because both keyers had entered it with the same exact error, there was no way for me to correct it. I'll wait until the index for those pages are online, then I'll submit alternate information, showing that it was a transcription error. :-)

Thank you so much for this information!!!!!!
I was able to find my Grandparents in the
1940 Census!! My mother was 12 at the time.