The 1950 Census was released today at Search | 1950 Census and can be searched for free.
On the off chance people are interested in genealogy I thought I’d start a thread for those who may have found something unexpected. I haven’t found anything yet, but my relatives from back then had more common last names and lived in cities so I haven’t found many records yet of people I’m sure are relatives. On one genealogy newsletter I get it said that a few people have reported finding things like a sibling they never knew about, father divorced and not yet married to their mom, etc.
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Easily found my parents and older brother right where they were supposed to be.
Edit - and found my mother’s parents, also no surprises.
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I can’t find my dad’s or mom’s families. Weird. They have uncommon names, and one lived in a major city while the other lived in a small rural city.
I’m waiting for the 1970s census to be released. About that time, I met a woman through girl scouts (I was one) who said “I remember your family from when I took the census at your house. Your father knew all the full names and birth dates for all of you.” (there were 6 kids) I just laughed and said “He doesn’t know ANY of our birthdays or ages.” She was shocked he LIED to a government official!
It will be interesting to see what he came up with. I’m sure it is a hodgepodge of right day/wrong year, an assortment of middle names, etc.
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Tried searching for Harry Truman in DC, did not come up with the expected result.
Handwriting interpretation by a computer program could mismatch what the handwritten name actually was supposed to be.
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Harry might have used Missouri as his official residence. That’s where he voted.
Search | 1950 Census shows a 5 year old female Harry Truman in Missouri.
On that page, the person writing wrote F like how Europeans write 7.
That was probably my father. He had no problem lying to census takers.
Found both of my parents, in/pre-school, both living with my grandparents. Nothing surprising. But I was hunting around Ancestry a few weeks ago and found that my father, who was always “the youngest of seven” had a younger sister no one ever mentioned - she lived 12 days.
No sign of my relatives in Flint, Michigan, although they had a very common last name and I’m quite sure they were there.
^ Flint didn’t work for me, either. And the forms looked different from other states.
But in a different state I found my mom and 11 relatives all listed as living together in the small house she grew up in. I signed up to help transcribe those entries because that Census taker had really messy handwriting. Only new thing was that Grandma who had been divorced for 10 years was listed as “sep” for separated instead of “D” for marital status even though bio grandpa had remarried years earlier. They were all big Catholics living in a small town and I wonder why they were concerned what the Census taker thought.
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My relatives that I can’t find are all from Michigan, as well.
When they released one of the census years (I think maybe 1920?) my sister had a copy and my mother’s aunt (who raised her) was visiting. Our aunt had worked for the town clerk for many years and recognized the handwriting. “Oh, that’s Mr. Potter’s writing.” It was beautiful. I think the people went to the clerk’s office and registered?
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I spent my whole career working on the Decennial Census (1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010), so was sure to start by trying to find my family and grandparents in northern NJ. I found the address of the 6-family house that my grandmother owned, with the other 5 units occupied by her married children. Since people were listed as the enumerator traveled, I found my sister and all of the other families on one page, but had the hardest time finding my Mom, Dad and self–the previous page required some research.
Census taking has certainly changed across the decades!
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My father’s family in Cleveland, OH was not listed. My grandfather came from a tiny village on an Italian island with a very uncommon last name. He was the only one of his family to emigrate. It should be an easy search, if spelled correctly, but nothing came up. I tried using my grandmother and my father’s first names, both very uncommon, but nothing. I checked the listings for similarly spelled surnames, in case the census taker spelled the name wrong, but no matches. They only ever lived in one house (my dad’s brother now lives in the house). Their family is included in the previous census - I have those records.
My mom’s family though, with a more common Irish name, came up fairly easily in Massachusetts.
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Found me, my sister, parents and apparently a Mother’s Helper who lived with us. She was 17. Kind of creepy. The government knows everything!
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I’m surprised this is out – I thought there was a rule (written or unwritten) that census results wouldn’t be released that include people who are now under something like 90 years of age… (My extended family had some grumbling about confidential type info that came out in the 1940 census – I’d better buckle my seatbelt for all the tidbits that are likely about to tumble out now:/)
Time to change your bank security / password reset questions to something other than “what was the street you grew up on?” and others that can be discovered through released census information.
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AFAIK, it’s been 72 years since the 1870 data was released in 1942. It was codified through Public Law 95-416, amending Chapter 21 of US Code Title 44, in 1978.
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I finally found my grandparents on my moms side. Their last name begins “Gar” but it was indexed as “Glar” because on the line above the person’s name had an “f” in it and the cursive “f” reached down and almost touched the “a” on the line with their name.
So I guess machine learning isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. A human looking at that line immediately sees the “f” is connected to the line above and ignores it, but the computer did not. It also means the name permutations you might need to search for (or check) are going to be huge.