At midnight, three companies picked up their copies of the census from NARA and are already busy uploading the files. As of 12:30am MDT, Ancestry.com has some images available for DC, Nevada, and it appears they have just begun to upload Maine. There will probably be more by the time you read this. No sightings yet on some of the other sites, but they will have some available later in the day.
At 8:30am Eastern Time (6:30am Mountain), there will be an opening event webcast from NARA on their 1940 census site. At 9am, all of the images for the entire country should be available at that site. NARA is not creating an index, so you will need ED numbers to find any records. Also keep in mind that their servers may not be able to handle the traffic, so have a little patience and check on the other major sites that are also hosting images to see if they have uploaded the locations you need: FamilySearch.org, Archives.com, findmypast.co.uk, Ancestry.com, and WorldVitalRecords.com. The images will be free on all of the sites.
In addition, Ancestry.com has made available one billion records from 1930-1950 on their web site until April 10th. Some of the records in this collection include the 1930 census, city directories, obituaries, birth indexes, marriage details, naturalization records, and more.
And don’t forget to sign up to index. Our group, UJGS, still has only one member.
The 1940 US Census will be released to the public in four days, at 9am Eastern Time on April 2nd.
The National Archives (NARA) has an interesting video about preparing the census for its digital release. This will be the first census to be released digitally.
Connie Potter recently spoke at the NY Public Library about the census. She is featured in previous video. The Legal Genealogist, Judy G. Russell, provides us some interesting lessons from that presentation.
And don’t forget about the indexing collaboration between FamilySearch, Archives.com, and findmypast. The index created by these sites, and the thousands of genealogists volunteering, will remain free forever. From their 1940 Census site, you can learn more about the census and download the indexing software. Don’t forget to check out the blog while you’re there to learn all kinds of other things about the census and the decade.
If you weren’t already excited about the release of the 1940 US Census, hopefully you will be once you see what’s coming. We all have a lot of people to look for. The sooner the index is finished, the sooner we can all find them without searching for addresses. Please help with the indexing!
You can download the indexing software and get yourself set up and ready to go. To read about Banai’s personal experience with setting up the indexing software, you can visit her blog. She shared this post at our last meeting; it includes some screenshots.
The first screen will allow you either to log in or to register if you don’t have a FamilySearch account. After logging in, it will ask you to choose a country, LDS stake, or group. Utah Jewish Genealogical Society is now listed as a participating society, so please sign up with us to represent your society. If you’re already using the software, you can set or change your group from the top menus: Tools > Options > Edit My Preferences.
Jewish Records Indexing -Poland (JRI-Poland) has introduced a new tool to their web site called the Surname Distribution Mapper.
[It is] designed to help genealogy researchers graphically understand where their family names first appeared in the 19th century records and visualize how the family spread throughout Poland into the first part of the 20th century.
Using modern mapping technology provided by Google Maps, the Surname Distribution Mapper allows users to graphically display their search results using a tree icon… By running the cursor over each tree icon, a user can view a popup window displaying the number of vital record entries found in various towns in the JRI-Poland database. Clicking on the balloon brings the user to the familiar JRI-Poland search results for detailed viewing of a town’s entries.
Additionally, and especially exciting for researchers, the Surname Distribution Mapper can display results for specific decades or in a “progressive mode,” where tree icons appear successively by decade to give the researcher an idea of the movement of their family around Poland and the Western Ukraine.
After reading the press release, I realized that there was more to this than I’d originally noticed. As before, from the JRI-Poland home page (link at the top of this post), you go to “Search the Database”. Near the top of that page, click on the text below “Surname Distribution Mapper”. Type in your surname and click on “Map”. Then be a little patient; it’s not instantaneous.
The results will be a map of Poland overlaid with trees, the sizes of the trees indicating the number of records for each location. It uses the Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching. For my own Mularzewicz family, this works great, as there are a few spelling variations in the records/transcriptions. Unfortunately, my Szleper name, while focused on Kalisz correctly, also focused on L’viv and the name Szlimper, which I consider a false match.
Mularzewicz Distribution
You can zoom into the map if the trees are too condensed. Moving your mouse over each tree will show a pop-up of the city/town name and the number of records with that name, including a link to see those hits in the usual table format of the site.
The feature I hadn’t noticed before is the “Time Period” menu just below where you enter the surname. You can choose one decade at a time to see where the name first appeared and then watch it spread out over time. It beings with “All” time as the default.
There are a couple of minor limitations. This is searching the JRI-Poland database, which anyone who has used it as much as I have knows that not every vital event was recorded. If an event was recorded in a different town from where it took place, it will show up where recorded, even if the JRI-Poland listing specifies the town name. For instance, many of those Lomza hits for Mularzewicz actually took place in Rutki, but because the two locations are relatively close, the mapping information is still useful.
The search includes all of the JRI-Poland data, including any census records, books of residents, or other material, along with the vital records of birth, marriage, and death.
The Surname Distribution Mapper is a useful addition to the JRI-Poland database. Instead of searching through the results for each gubernia, or trying to find the towns on the map to determine their proximity, this new tool shows where the surname can be found on the map for you. And the additional “progressive mode” helps you track the surname over time. Before now, I had no idea the first sighting of Mularzewicz in the records was in Sniadowo.
Stanley Diamond, the Executive Director of JRI-Poland, forwarded the press release to us. Any opinions expressed in this blog post are that of the author and not the society.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, also called “The Joint”) has announced the launch of the JDC Archives web site at http://archives.jdc.org/. It is the culmination of a five year digitization project. The digital collection contains searchable text from collections from 1914-1932, a names index of over 500,000 names, a detailed interactive timeline, historically-themed exhibitions, over 45,000 photographs, and more.
The JDC was founded in 1914 as a distribution channel for funds from American Jews to Palestine. It is the world’s leading Jewish humanitarian assistance organization, working in more than 70 countries and in Israel to alleviate hunger and hardship, rescue Jews in danger, create lasting connections to Jewish life, and provide immediate relief and long-term development support for victims of natural and man-made disasters.
Does the JDC have a piece of your family’s history? Visit their site today to find out.
