Locate an address for the person you want to find
It will be an immense help. Where did she live when the 1940 was taken? Is she in a late -1940s or 1950s city or telephone directory? Do you have an envelope with her address? Be creative about ways to find the address or general locality. If you don't have a specific address, even the name of a town or other locality will help.
Use an E.D. finder (E.D. stands for Enumeration District.)
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Ancestry's 1950 Census district finder. This is especially helpful for small communities and rural areas.
- Steve Morse's Unified Census Finder (choose the year) and Viewing Enumeration District Maps. (Amanda of ABT UK left a comment on a previous post saying that these tools are more helpful than Ancestry's tool when looking for someone in large cities. Thanks for the tip, Amanda.)
Look at the records
Go to National Archives 1950 Census where you will be able to enter the state and county names and the E.D. number. You will probably still need to look through several pages of census records but the 1950 census pages have fewer names per page which makes it quicker to look through them; and each E.D. seems to have only about 30 pages.
These are the steps I will follow UNTIL FamilySearch or Ancestry or another organization has created an every-name index.
If you know of other or better tools, please share and I'll add them to this post. Thanks!
-–Nancy.
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You are lucky to be included in this census. My sister will be there, but I won't appear till the 1960 one. I wonder if I'll still be around then. I'm excited to fill out some of the families that got married after the war. There's still a lot of work to be done.
ReplyDeleteAs I was writing this post it struck me that if I'd been born four months later, I would be in this census! So glad I am.
DeleteI hope you'll still be around, though we can never tell....
And I hope you're able to find many of your families.
Yeah, my immigrant parents hadn't met or married yet, mom may have been in Pittsburgh in 1950 working as a maid, dad was somewhere in Chicago. Need the name index, no idea where people were until mid-1950s :)
ReplyDeleteOh, John, that's a hard one, not knowing where your parents lived. Thank goodness there will be an index. You'll probably find your parents in a few months.
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