The census records — released Monday and digitalized for the first time — can be searched at http://1940census.archives.gov/, the official census website. It proved so heavily trafficked on Monday that local users reported numerous system crashes.
The 1940 census is unusually revealing — more revealing than the 2010 census will be for our ancestors. It’s a snapshot of life in America in the twilight between the Great Depression and World War II. It’s like Christmas for local genealogists. “You read history books, but that’s not about you,” explained Earl Chadwick of Miami Twp., president of the Montgomery County chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society. “It’s your personal history, finding things about your ancestors and how they lived that you didn’t know.”
It wasn’t just the genealogists who were crashing the website Monday, Chadwick noted, but the simply curious: “People were looking up famous people — Jimmy Hoffa, for instance. Nobody can find him, but now people can say, ‘I found him; he’s in the 1940s census.’”
Shawna Woodard, genealogy librarian for Dayton Metro Library, explained the fascination: “Each of the census years contains a lot of information about family members who are all living together. We find children who died in childhood we didn’t know about, because nobody talks about them. We find out family secrets — people not living together even though they are married.”
The census records aren’t as easily searchable as they will be in another year or so, after an army of volunteers have indexed them by name. For now, they are only searchable if you have an address or a fairly targeted location. Knowing the cross streets is more valuable than the actual address if you want to find your parents or grandparents in their proper “enumeration district.”
I had a distinct advantage: My grandparents lived in the same Dayton home — 659 Carlisle Ave. — from 1913 until my grandmother’s death in 1965.
Even then, it takes some digging. I scrolled through page after page of scratchy, quaint-looking handwriting before finding my grandparents, Frank Seiler, a 53-year-old lithographer, and his wife Josephine, a 51-year-old seamstress, at 659 Carlisle Ave. in Dayton. Their four children, including my mother, 11-year-old Vera. No bombshells here: The information corroborated the stories I had always been told. My grandparents both left school after eighth grade, working long days to support their families.
The real revelation for me was placing my grandparents in the context of their time and their community. Most of their 18 grandchildren would graduate from college, but my grandparents were hardly unusual in having only a grade-school education; some of their neighbors never made it past the fourth grade. A surprising number of the residents in these single-family homes were listed as “lodgers” — a carryover from the Great Depression when many families lost their homes, and others took in boarders in order to keep theirs.
The records were collected in 1940 by 120,000 census workers known at the time as “enumerators.” Particularly valuable, noted avid genealogist Rosemary Herron of Kettering, is the documentation of 1935 addresses — a question not asked in any census before or since, and one that reveals the migratory nature of America during the Depression. “This is very helpful, because so often people disappear and don’t show up again until the next census,” Herron said. “You just hit a brick wall.”
The best kind of genealogy, no doubt, are the stories you hear from your parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles. But many of us don’t ask until it’s too late, and many stories are simply never shared.
“This is a snapshot of that one day in history,” Woodard enthused. “Through the census records find out occupations we may never had heard in our family lore, or that we’ve never heard of before. My grandfather worked as a gandy dancer; he pounded nails on the railroad tracks. I didn’t even know what that was. We found my great-grandfather in an Oklahoma penitentiary, which was consistent with the family story that he had killed a man in a bar fight.”
Some family mythology proves to be just that. “We can’t all be the descendants of Indian princesses,” Woodard said. “As genealogists, we work with facts and good stories. Both are very good, but when they come together that’s even better.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty@DaytonDaily News.com.
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