The 1940 U.S. Census

1940 almost feels too recent. In ten years, imagine how many Baby Boomers will be available on the 1950 sheets.

I tried to get in there yesterday, but obviously never saw anything because the site was so overwhelmed. Looking forward to seeing my grandparents on the rolls and to see who lived on my street back then.

I grew up near a man-made lake with 300 miles worth of shoreline. The dam wasn't dedicated until October 1963 (the one and only time a sitting president visited my home county, JFK about six weeks before he was shot), so it's going to be weird to see all of these addresses that are underwater.

What are you going to look for?

i <3 u

http://www.gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs/55759_o.gif

oh man this is so cool!!!!!!

found out that Edward Garber, paint store owner, along with his wife Estella and their children Alvin and Annette, used to be the sole occupants of my building

Meet my maternal grandparents and great-grandparents.

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/8922/screenshot20120403at115.png

Leave it to my shifty grandfather (JP), who left my family two years after my mother's birth nine years later, to have some weird notation next to his name scribbled out.

that is so great

Interested in dropping by the old Durham homestead in Memphis to see where my family spent over 60 years? Click here!

Just found my paternal grandparents' household -- four of the 12 kids had already grown up and moved out by that point.

I guess you all now know my mother's maiden name. Feel free to pay off my credit cards.

(apparently, it's "Baueuusumm".)

agh i don't get how to navigate this at all

rtfm i know

it's kind of a huge pain

It took me like twenty minutes to figure out.

yeah it looked a little daunting

i've figured out which 'schedule' i want to look at, how do i know which lines correspond to which street?

oh wait i think i get it. the sheets i looked at had the street line blank i guess

I've looked at Tennessee's and Arkansas', and I'm not sure they're exactly the same state-by-state.

Right now, if you don't know the precise address (or intersection) someone lived at, you're kinda screwed.

(I was tempted on that Memphis one to use "I-40?" as the intersection, but alas it wasn't available in the drop.)

I checked my current address. My apartment building is essentially three connected six-flats, each with their own front door. Each six-flat is divided into two street numbers, with "400" representing the units on the south side of the floor and "402" for those on the south side. (Note: These are not the actual numbers.) I discovered that in 1940 these were three-flats instead, with the combined street number "400-402."

Here's who lived there:

The second-floor tenants (occupying the space I currently reside) were 36-year-old Christopher Russell (a clerk for the City Clerks Office), his 34-year-old wife Lucille (a stenographer for a real-estate agency), and her 63-year-old mother, Katherine McCaskey.

Downstairs was another couple in their 30s, O.M. and Lolita Shelley, and their 8-year-old daughter, Carol. He worked as a chemist for a wholesale pie bakery.

Upstairs was 68-year-old Flora Donohue and her three adult daughters. The younger two worked as stenographers, while the oldest, Marie, was an accountant for Underwr!ters Lab0rat0r!es (which, coincidentally, is where my mother-in-law now works).

Rent was $50/month for the 1st and 2nd floor apartments and $52.50/month for the top one.

I tried to look up the home I live in now, but there were no street numbers on the schedule, just the neighborhood name.

this is cool but queens is really confusing and I think I will have to look through 400 pages to find my apt

i looked thru 30-odd pages of my hometown and never ran into my house #

really weird jaymc that they googleproofed the business' name in the census.

I know, right?

Btw, here's the nearest corner in 1949:
http://oi39.tinypic.com/35mf8uv.jpg

there should be a thread for old pictures of your neighborhood

love the professions of people who lived in my building: traveling salesman, pool room proprietor, machinist at the novelty factory, baseball player

there should be a thread for old pictures of your neighborhood
our dining room has about 10 pictures of old toronto including a map from 1912, my just barely midtown neighbourhood was considered the outskirts and appears in nothing :(

in 1940 a huuuge chunk of my hometown was born in the netherlands.

Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this is funny but:

All the street names were the same then as they are now in my neighborhood except for one: Sometime in the past 72 years, "Division" Street was rechristened as "Fiesta".

i thought that migratory wave was limited to the first settlers in the 19th cent but i guess not!

xp

old pictures of the place you live now

hey jaymc where can i find the rent info?

love the professions of people who lived in my building: traveling salesman, pool room proprietor, machinist at the novelty factory, baseball player

― 1staethyr, Tuesday, April 3, 2012 3:04 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

omg you really could not get a better roundup of "1940s* jobs"

* in the popular imagination

i used to do tours in washington heights and show pictures of what it looked like in like 1908 and it's like two buildings and nothing else in any direction. always got lots of ooo's and ahh's.

never mind found the rent stuff!

It took me forever to find our place but there was a Kentuckian cook, his New York born wife and his stepdaughter, born in LA, living there in 1940. Looks like they paid $30.00 bucks a month in rent.

omg you really could not get a better roundup of "1940s* jobs”

seriously. AND they were all brothers

and they all died in the war

haha i just noticed that the fifth brother was a laborer at the “baby furniture factory”

and the sixth brother was
http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsD/4122-23957.gif

hey jaymc where can i find the rent info?

Column 5: Value of home, if owned, or monthly rental, if rented.

never mind found the rent stuff!

Sorry, just saw this!

My great-granddad said his house was worth $2000.

In my state, you can buy a used car for $2000 and not have to pay the sales tax.

Damn it, I am trying to page through 24 pages and it's slooooow. I think my home is going to be on the 22nd page or something.

I found our house!

Rented by the Harlens (?) kinda looks like Haslen, not quite sure.
$20 a month rent

Charles, husband, 65 of Illinois - he's a (something) man at the Boot Factory, income $1100
Rose, wife, 35 of California - canner at the cannery, but wasn't working that week, income $425
They both get supplemental income from another unspecified source.

No kids.

oh mofo I was looking at the wrong one, there were two nearly-blank pages at the end

no photos, sadly. But there used to be a street car that ran past our house, and connected up with the Broadway streetcar, before they built the freeways that carved up Oak Park from downtown. You can still see the faint outline of the tracks on the street if you look from the right angle.

The main artery that runs through our neighborhood, JFK Blvd, was known then as the ARK-MO HIGHWAY. (I'm about 180 miles from Missouri, at the moment.)

Ark-Mo!

I am currently browsing through some records looking for some of my family's stuff in West Va., and I hate to GO THERE, but there's a real shortage of last names to go around for 50 pages worth of records in this district.

lol

Although I did just run into a family named Boner. Thomas, Rose, Thomas Jr., Charles, Gladys, Thelma, Marion, Bonnie, Betty and Hattie Boner.

Bonnie Boner. My god.

there's a real shortage of last names to go around for 50 pages worth of records in this district.

No one has any income listed because they were all farmers.

I think my apartment was occupied by 50 year old Belgian caterer Emil Massin and his wife Clara Belle.

I just realized my house didn't exist in 1940; it wasn't built until 1946. But the rest of my street was . . . pretty much as it is now. A lot of Russian-born Jews who were tailors and grocers.

I was looking up an old apartment, one that a landlord once tried to convince me was a former Civil War hospital. It sits on a very main drag through a prominent neighborhood, but I could not find its name on the list anywhere.

Finally, I remembered old Prospect Park and it occurred to me that the street had been renamed post-WWII. Can't find Twin Pines Mall on these old maps either.

It looks like my home was owned by Victor and Ruth Gannon (?), ages 42 and 37. Not sure about the last name, but I could check the 1930 census since it says they lived there since before then. He was a body/fender man at an auto body shop.

Wrong timeline. Look for Lone Pine Mall.

where to access the 1940s?

Start here and good luck.

http://1940census.archives.gov/

Putting that in the OP would've been classy on my part, but then again, I don't even like labeling the people in my "photographed together" contributions.

you roll stealth mode, we appreciate that

found my enumeration districts but can't zoom out, will try this at home

download the JPEGs

oh, sweet

I wish you could download all the jpgs at once, like a pdf

my current place was occupied by russian tailors

also saw this on one of the county maps

http://oi39.tinypic.com/25a2kwm.jpg

wasn't a good attempt for scott kannberg to branch out on genres.

FINALLY found some of my family's info after searching a ton of pages. In 1940, my mother's parents lived in Gypsy, W. Va., an unincorporated part of Harrison County. It's really hard to dig through the info for these tiny unincorporated areas, but in any case, the census taker visited my grandmother's and grandfather's families consecutively.

The top family seen here, Casto, is my grandmother's (Margaret, age 16). She and her sister Betty Lou are the only ones listed here still alive; she's got a much younger sister, Nancy, who's also alive.

The bottom family, Dennison, is my grandfather's (Harold, age 22). Everyone listed there is now deceased. Didn't realize that my grandfather never completed higher than 7th grade. (Although he may have gotten his GED after enlisting in the Army in 1941.) Curious too that he's not listed as working; I know he was working in the coal mines by then, but maybe there was no work to be had.

Within two years of this info being written down, my grandparents would be married and my uncle, Harold Jr., would be born.

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/t/ar5tx.jpg

lol oops

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/ar5tx.jpg

My sister was impressed by the homogeneity of one side of the family's hood in Brooklyn (all Jews) vs. the Philly side, which is a mix of Irish, Jews, Italian, Chinese ... Every once in a while it changes to block letters or there's some odd outlier that stumps the census worker, like a Brazilian.

One thing I've noticed, like in Phil's example, is damn, families were freaking huge even in 1940.

And that's just counting who was still living in the household.