Friday, March 16, 2012

1940 Census

On April 2, 2012, digital images of the 1940 U.S. census will be available, for free, at http://1940census.archives.gov. ..There are no indexes as yet; that will come later, ut there are ways to access the pages for the people you want to find and you can prepare now.

The NARA website has lots of good census information and suggestions to prepare for the arrival of the census. Without an index you need to know the address and enumeration district (ED) of the families you want to find. If you don’t know the address you might look in city directories, the 1930 census, or other records available to you that would have an address. You can find enumeration maps at http://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940/finding-aids.html#mapsor.

Better yet, visit the Stephen Morse website. You can locate the ED by address and locations or convert a 1930 ED to 1940 here.  If you haven’t visited this site you should check it out. He has an amazing selection of “One-Step” searches, but we’ll focus on the 1940 census now. If you know where your family lived you can use this website to determine where to look in the census, even without the index. For the 1940 census go to Unified 1940 Census ED Finder. Once the census pages are online you can access the first page of the enumeration district and look through the pages for the people you are looking for.

You can also watch the Legacy webinar “Navigating the 1940 U.S. census” presented by Thomas MacEntee. It is available to view for free until March 19, 2012.

 There are opportunities for volunteers to help with indexing the census through local genealogy organizations or FamilySearch. The more volunteers, the quicker we have an index. It’s not difficult and is good experience. Get more information or sign up at https://www.familysearch.org/1940census.

Get your list ready.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

April Meeting

For our April 7, 2012 meeting we will be discussing the digital archives of the Library of Virginia. We ask everyone to explore the archives for family information . After a short presentation we will share our finds with the group.  See you all in April!

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Welcome

Hi everyone.

 Welcome to our Virginia Group Blog. I hope we can use this blog as a way to share information about our group and collaborate on our Virginia research.  The blog is for the group, and we will use it for the group. Everyone will be able to post research and family information and messages. For now, until we get things going the blog will be private, just for group members who choose to join. Eventually we will be posting all Virginia Group information here, instead of the Google group list we've been using.

Don't forget our Saturday, March 3 rd meeting at 10 am. Peggy Baldwin will be discussing using tax records for your research. This is an extremely valuable tool for genealogists. I hope you can all attend.

See you Saturday

Judi Scott