Issue 17.12
At FamilySearch.org you can see the 1940 U.S. Census for free. It takes a little time to load and index 132.2 million people’s names. A lot of people want to know when the records for a specific state are going to be posted on FamilySearch and on the FamilySearch Indexing site. Each day they get more states posted. FamilySearch is hoping to have all of them posted and available in the first few weeks after they were released from the National Archives on April 2, 2012.
As of the writing of this article, 15 states had been posted. Hopefully by the time it is printed there will be numerous more. The next paragraph is a list of states. They are listed in the order they were posted (or planned to be posted) to the FamilySearch site. Delaware was the first posted and the index is complete. As soon as the indexing and arbitration is completed it will roll down the pipeline to become posted online. They will not wait until all of the states are finished, FamilySearch will post them as soon as they are ready.
Delaware, Virginia, Kansas, Oregon, Colorado, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Alabama, Minnesota, New Hampshire, California, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Washington, Georgia, Idaho, Maryland, Nebraska, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Arizona, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Iowa, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming, Alaska Territory, Hawaii Territory, Guam, Panama Canal Zone, American Samoa, US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
Thank you to all of you who are working so hard to index the 1940 US Census. It is amazing to see what has been accomplished so far. The day before the census was released from the archives was Sunday, April 1. Sundays are usually the busiest days for indexing. That day just over a million records were indexed. The next day, Monday when the census began going online for indexing, FamilySearch Indexing had over two million records indexed. Tuesday there were 3.57 million records indexed! You can see there is great excitement over the indexing project.
All of this time and effort is given freely, by volunteers. Each batch, which is one page of 40 names on a census page, is indexed by two separate indexers, and if they don’t type the exact same thing in each field on the entire batch, it goes to a third person, the arbitrator. Arbitrators are very important as they have the final say and decide which of the indexers is correct or if they are both wrong, they add their opinion to the final index.
For more information, contact Shanna Jones shannasjones@msn.com (435)628-4900.