1940 Census Available Digitally

March 15, 2012 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on 1940 Census Available Digitally

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.

Posted in , ,

Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.