1940 Census

Well, the 1940 Census has been released, but it's not that easy to access it.  Ancestry.com is organizing  the entire census by names, but it's a tedious process and only Delaware and Nevada have been finished.  So, in order to find the right family, you have to know the "enumeration district."  Ancestry has a tool that helps you find the enumeration district, but first you have to know the address of the family you're looking for, as well as the cross streets.  That means you have to access Google earth or Google maps or some other source to try to find the right enumeration district. 

I only had one family I was looking for in 1940 for which I knew not only the address but also the enumeration district, and that was my mother's family.  She lived on Marion Avenue in Lima, Ohio, and I thought the cross street was Baxter.  So I punched in the street names and got he enumeration district.  Then I had the daunting task of possibly having to look through 24 pages.  Fortunately, I found the right family on page 6.  There they were: my grandmother Bernadine (my grandfather was deceased); my aunts Marcella and Mary Catherine; my uncles Alfred and Charles; and my mother Frances.

I can't tell you what it felt like to see this: the family I remember from my childhood, all together in one place, frozen in time.  My mother was only 13 years old, just two years older than my grandson Sean is today.  And though the family had been without their father for 10 years, it was likely a happy time.  WW II had not started and they were all together.  No one was married yet.  My aunt Marcie, at age 26 was helping to support the family.  My uncle Al would enter the service soon and then marry.  My uncle Charlie was 21 years old.  He would die of complications from diabetes 15 years later.  My aunt Kay (whom I called "Dede") was 15.  She would eventually marry and raise 6 sons.  And my mother would marry my father two weeks before he left for Japan during WW II.  Fortunately, the war ended while he was en route, so he didn't see combat, but they were separated for a year while he was in the army of occupation.

Now I want to find my dad's family in Lima, Ohio.  I already tried to look up his family by their street, which I think at that time was O'Connor.  But the ancestry tool doesn't include that street, so I'm wondering if the street was renamed at some time.  I'm going to have to do some digging. But that's what genealogy is all about.