This has been a fun day! With the release of the 1940 census there has been a lot of excitement among many to see the records. Technical glitches abounded online as unexpected demand crashed the NARA website but there was still plenty to do.
What did I do? I made a half-hearted attempt to locate my paternal grandfather in Manhattan by browsing the New York records on Ancestry.com but gave that up after an hour. That was enough for me to realize I don’t even want to attempt to go through the census until it’s indexed; my family moved around too much. 🙂
I am coordinating a group of indexers for FamilySearch for the TNGenWeb, so several of us spent the evening indexing. Currently, we have 30 members and as of this writing we have indexed over 3500 records (about 1,000 of them are census records). I myself only indexed two batches tonight so plan to do more tomorrow – I worked on Colorado. My favorite name of the evening was Perfecto Chavis – he and his family lived in Pueblo County.
Then, after that, I did some indexing for another project – the NCGenWeb Yearbook Database. I started this about two years ago and tonight crossed the 30,000 threshold for the number of names indexed. Whoo hoo!
It’s been a good day.
My Census Day
