In the 1970s when the law was passed to require a 72 years delay, that was the average life span predicted at birth. Life expectancy ranged from 70 or 71 in the early 70s to 73 or 74 later in the 70s.
Just discovered that my mother’s grandfather was living in their house with them in 1950. I never knew anything about him before this.
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To correct that mistake, you can submit the right spelling using a link on that same page.
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I couldn’t find my parents, but I did find my aunt, uncle, and their under-one-year-old son. Today, all three are again living in the same household, a block or two from where they were in 1950. I guess they beat the odds!
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Yes — a relative named Leslie appears as “Leshi” in the database.
The census is not yet fully searchable by name. One must have the census enumeration district (ED) to get anywhere with it, so if you’re not sure of the address, you may get nothing. That said, I looked up my dad, who lived in the same house in a small Missouri city from 1937-1957, and he wasn’t there (nor the rest of his family). Ancestry is saying it will be several months before name-based searching is available. The 1950 census info was OCR scanned, so it’s a different technology than previously.
This is a VERY hot topic on the Jewish geneaology groups where I participate. I’m just going to sit tight until there’s more easily accessible and worth my search time. I have a long, long list of people to find…
Ok, so I did find somewhere online that had 1950 enumeration districts and I did find my dad and his mother and siblings. Didn’t find my grandfather, who was certainly there. Lots of”no one at home” on that page, which I don’t recall seeing so much in other years.
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I had some luck with several searches but they all had spelling errors so the hunt took quite a while. One small surprise was the occupation listed for my dad’s stepfather, which I’d never heard about. It made sense given that his previous work was physically taxing.
Second cousins (once removed? - I’ve never quite caught on) on my mother’s side were found living one street behind my maternal grandparents, sharing their tiny home with his mother and their toddler son. It’s a small thing, but I was happy to find them there as I have fond memories of how they loved my widowed grandmother and took her out every week when she wasn’t living with my folks.
I ran into the same with several relatives. It made me wonder if the post-war housing shortage was still a thing in 1950, and I guess it makes sense that it would be an ongoing problem.
I have only tried on my phone, and perhaps there are other search criteria on the full desktop version, but I haven’t found my parents. Are people living on military bases in different enumeration districts than those in the town?
I have an easy way to figure out relationships without having to memorize the definitions. Suppose, for example, the brother or sister of one of your grandparents is in the path down to the relative you want to calculate. It’s 2 levels up to that grandparent, over to their sibling, then suppose it’s 2 levels down to the relative. So you’re 2nd cousins. If it’s 2 up and then 3 levels down to the relative, you’re 2nd cousins once removed. You just need to start with the person in the tree that is higher (you or your relative) and then trace the path up, thru a sibling, and back down.
This is useful at family gatherings where people may not know the official definitions but can explain the chain of people linking you and them. It’s a snap to count up and then back down.
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I was able to find both of my parents by searching my grandparents’ name and county. The listed birthplace of one parent and a sibling were incorrect.
Here’s a nice chart. It’s all really logical.
I learned all this when I studied Anthropology in college. There were cultures where everyone in your generation was brother/sister and everyone above mother/father. There were others where every single kind of relative had a different title - mother’s sister and father’s sister and mother’s brother’s wife and father’s brother’s wife all had different designations. Not just aunt!
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Nth cousin Mth removed means:
- The descendants of a sibling of your ancestor N generations before you.
- The cousin M generations more between your descent from your Nth ancestor and the cousin’s descent from the sibling of your Nth ancestor.
So your second cousin once removed is your grandparent’s sibling’s great-grandchild.
Nephew / niece is a way of saying zeroth cousin once removed, although nephew / niece requires knowing the person’s gender.
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My mother’s first cousin is my first cousin once removed (one generation). That cousin’s child is my second cousin.
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I think there was lots of multigenerational living back then. My grandparents were gainfully employed and owned their house, they would of course house their elderly parent with them. Especially since they were all immigrants, my great-grandfather probably never worked in the US, only back in Italy.
There were a lot of people in their house that year - the four of them living in the first floor apartment and a family of 3 living upstairs (tenants whom they rented to).
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Thank you to whomever mentioned searching by enumeration district. Even though I had the correct address for my father’s family (house is still in the family almost 90 years later), searching by city and name was not yielding results.
I went down a rabbit hole trying to find the correct enumeration district using my ipad last night. Using my computer would’ve been easier due to funky drop down menus. Anyway, even when I narrowed down the right district, I had to scroll through each individual page looking for their name - I finally found them and realized the problem - the census taker had written down the cross street, not their actual street.
One interesting tidbit - my grandfather was the only immigrant on their street. The rest, except for my grandmother born in Boston, had all been born in OH. I suppose that makes sense as they bought a home in a middle class neighborhood of single family homes on the edge of the city limits. My great aunts, all married to first gen Italians like themselves, lived on the other side of the city in a more urban Italian neighborhood of duplexes.
Both my parents lived in multigenerational households in 1950. My father (age 16) lived with his parents and brother, but in a different apartment (same address) lived his grandmother and a cousin. My mother (age 15) lived a few blocks away with her aunt and uncle, 4 cousins, and a great aunt. Both houses had been ‘family residences’ for many years and family moved in and out often.
I didn’t need the 1950 census to know where my parents lived in 1950. Are these things forgotten in families?
There’s more than just addresses on the census. The other questions vary from census to census. Once Ancestry, et al index the census info so it’s searchable by name, it’ll be much easier to find info.
Heck, my siblings don’t remember where we lived and when! Such is the life of an Army brat. A the oldest who remembers all of this stuff, I feel an obligation to document it for them and future generations.
I know where my dad lived in 1950; haven’t found them yet in the census, though, and EDs change from one census to another, depending on population growth. Am curious if they had boarders then, as I remember they had a long-term border in the house in the mid-60s when we visited.
I don’t know exactly where my mom lived in 1950. She was 11 yo, and while she was born in Milwaukee, after WWII ended, my grandfather started working for American Oil as an engineer, and over the next ten years, lived in Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois (and possibly in Charleston, SC immediately after the war, depending on when my GF was discharged). Don’t know exactly where they were between 1945-circa 1955, though my mom graduated from HS in the Chicago burbs in 1957.
As for my H’s side of the family…most of them were still in NYC in the 1940s; most of the great-grandparents died in the 1950s, so I want the 1950 address when I order death certificates (its one of the pieces VitalChek requests, and it’s also helpful now that Release the Records has compelled NYC to make some records free and public). Their children and grandchildren were in the family-building years, and were moving out of NYC, so I suspect the decades of having everyone in one apartment/neighborhood are going to end with this census.
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