By Jon Mettus
Business Editor
After a mandatory 72-year waiting period, the Sixteenth Census of the United States, the 1940 census, was made available to the public online through the National Archives and Archives.com on Monday, April 2. These archives include digital images of over 3.8 million pages of census reports.
The federal government imposes a waiting period to protect the privacy of the census respondents for a period deemed then as the longest life span.
Just a day after the records were released, the National Archives and Records Administration was overwhelmed with traffic. The nearly 22.5 million hits it received crashed the website where the archives were located.
This 1940 census was the first decennial census released immediately online, and was the largest collection of digital archives the National Archives ever released. But why is there all this interest in the census?
Part of the reason is the accessibility of the census. You don’t have to go rifling through archives, or go to some special location to get the information; all you have to do is go online and it’s all there for you. You can look people up by where they lived, down to their street name.
Recipients of the census were asked questions like age, race, birthplace, but also question about employment status; participation in New Deal programs; and extent of education. With such information available online for free, individuals can now learn more and more about their ancestors than ever before.
The 1940 census is basically a snapshot of not only the lives of individuals you may wish to access, but a snapshot of our nation as a whole. We can learn more and more about the towns, cities, and states, and just what the times were like. For example, according to the census, in 1940 Pennsylvania was the second most populous state with 9,900,180 people, behind only New York.
According to the National Archives, “The 1940 census reflects economic tumult of the Great Depression and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal recovery program of the 1930s.”
Most people are somehow connected to a person who was alive during the time of the 1940 census. We can now gain a direct look into their lives. You may not be able to tell what religion they were, or what exactly their personal life was, but the census, if nothing else, is a way for you to fill in the gaps on your family tree.
Economists can look at how different jobs fared during the Great Depression. Historians can look at migration patterns, family sizes, and effectiveness of FDR’s New Deal programs. There is a wide array of information that anyone can access now, which was never available before.
By 1940 the nation was trying to recover from the Great Depression. Just around the corner was World War II. This census is the last recorded of some of the many U.S. soldiers who would die in the most deadly conflict ever.
Beside just the hard numbers aspect, the census is very nostalgic for some. Bringing them back to the old days, and helping them remember things about their childhood they may have forgotten.
Genealogists and ordinary citizens alike have been intrigued by the newly released reports, and all for good reason. This census unlocks a whole new door, behind which is a massive amount of untapped information about America in 1940.
