The 1950 Census has Arrived: What to Know with Joel Weintraub

Sunday, April 3, 2022 at 4pm ET
Free – Zoom registration required

Population form taken from census.gov

The U.S. 1950 census will become public on April 1, 2022. Society members alive on April 1st, 1950 and a resident of the U.S. and its territories should expect to see their name on the 1950 population schedule. Joel will provide advice on what you can do to prepare for the rollout. He will cover who uses the census, census caveats, who was enumerated and who wasn’t, how the 1950 census was taken, training of enumerators, enumerator instruction manuals, census sampling, and 1950 population and housing forms and large city block summaries. Joel will then discuss name (a preliminary index based on OCR’d handwriting may be available on day 1) and locational tools for finding people. 

The National Archives census map collection, and his and Steve Morse’s 1950 locational tools, online right now at the One-Step stevemorse.org website, will end the talk. The One-Step 1950 utilities took almost 8 years to produce with the the help of 70 volunteers, involve 230,000 or so searchable 1950 census district definitions with about 79,000 more small community names added, and street indexes for over 2,400 1950 urban areas that correlate with 1950 census district numbers

Joel Weintraub,PhD, a New Yorker by birth, is an emeritus Biology Professor at California State University, Fullerton. He became interested in genealogy over 20 years ago and volunteered for 9 years at the National Archives in southern California. Joel helped produce location tools for 1900 through 1950 federal censuses, and the NY State censuses for NYC (1905, 1915, 1925) for the Steve Morse “One-Step” website. He has published articles since retiring on the U.S. census and the 72-year rule, the name change belief and finding difficult passenger records at Ellis Island, searching NYC census records with the problems of NYC geography, and a revision of the biography of naturalist Adolphus Heermann. He has a YouTube channel with his genealogy and field biology talks at JDW Talks. His interests including birding, and collecting interesting exhibits for his PowerPoint talks.