Archives.com and the National Archives have worked together and set up a site where the 1940 census will be made available digitally and free of charge beginning April 2. This ends a 72-year wait for the records.
This interesting and somewhat confusing news was found on Deseret News in their article, “1940 census goes live April 2, expecting 250,000 thousand indexers.” The much anticipated record set consists of about 3.8 million images and 131 million names. It links to parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, which will be accessible to family historians for the first time. This will make many very happy. What will not make them happy and actually confuses me, is though the records will be available starting in early April, they will not be indexed, which means they will not be searchable by name.
I realize this is coming to fruition because of a large volunteer effort, but why compile data that is not searchable or findable?
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
