“There’s a little bit more excitement this time because it is being released online and it’s immediately available to people,” says Rebecca Warlow, 1940 Census project manager at the Archives. “Anybody with Internet access can sit with their PC and desktops and search to their heart’s content. … Previous Censuses were released on microfilms.”
A Census enumerator interviews a woman in 1940. That year’s Census is the first to be made available to the public on the Internet initially, rather than on microfilm.
At 9 a.m. ET Monday, the federal government will unlatch a new window on history: 1940 Census records open to the public for the first time.
Also for the first time, the images of the logs painstakingly handwritten by Census workers who traipsed door to door to count all 132.2 million Americans living then will be available online immediately for free.
People’s names, addresses, ages and even more personal information such as their marital status, how many kids they had, how much they earned and what they did for a living were kept under wraps for 72 years — as required by a confidentiality law.
Every 10 years, another Census becomes public. Each time, historians and genealogy buffs go atwitter over the bounty of information that can help them trace family trees and draw an even more precise portrait of how Americans lived.
About 21 million Americans who show up in the 1940 records are still alive.
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