Census documenting Great Depression to be released

[rug]

By CRISTIAN SALAZAR and RANDY HERSCHAFT | Associated Press – 23 mins ago

NEW YORK (AP) — It was a decade when tens of millions of people in the U.S. experienced mass unemployment and social upheaval as the nation clawed its way out of the Great Depression and rumblings of global war were heard from abroad.

Now, intimate details of 132 million people who lived through the 1930s will be disclosed as the U.S. government releases the 1940 census on April 2 to the public for the first time after 72 years of being kept confidential.

Access to the records will be free and open to anyone on the Internet — but they will not be immediately name searchable.

For genealogists and family historians, the 1940 census release is the most important disclosure of ancestral secrets in a decade and could shake the branches of many family trees. Scholars expect the records to help draw a more pointillistic portrait of a transformative decade in American life.

http://news.yahoo.com/census-documenting-great-depression-released-151755443.html

[kestrel91316]

1. We genealogists are waiting on pins and needles. I know where my parents both were then,

and their families. But I want to see them. They are both gone now, but they will live forever, in a way, in the census.

[jwirr]

2. They are not name searchable but hopefully they are listed by state/county. That will give me a

ton of relatives. Unfortunately I will be one year away form finding myself in the census.