Hey, it's time for a break from all this.
Have you checked out the 1950 Census data? I've never tried to use the Census's online data in the past, so I don't have good skills with its website. It took me some trial and error and a good bit of advice from people on Twitter. (What would I do without Twitter?)
First, I found some of my own relatives, because searching names of people in very specific places is the easiest thing to figure out. But I couldn't find my own house because I didn't know the last name of the people who lived here, and I couldn't even find my mother's parents because their name is too common.
Here's the additional information I found that made my search work.
- To find information, go to https://1950census.archives.gov. Once you're there, you can search a name and a county (and sometimes a city) in a particular state, and that may work for you if you know enough about who you're looking for and where they were.
- But if you don't, instead you need to know the Enumeration District of the area where you want to look around. To find that, go to https://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html. On that site, you can put in a state plus city or county with a street, plus the bounding streets, and it gives you the Enumeration District: that's the magic number.
- With that number, when you go to the 1950census.archives.gov site, you put the Enumeration District into the search. That will give you a text description of the District, and on the right side there will be a blue button that reads Population Schedule.
- That blue button is the place to click! It barely looks like a button, I know, but it's where everything is hidden.
- After you click the button, be sure to scroll down below whatever the first image is. I didn't at first, so I didn't realize that it had returned 32 pages for my district instead of just one. But there they were: 31 pages of original census forms. You can zoom in to read them better, make screen snapshots, or download the scanned forms.
- If you know more specifics, you can enter the Enumeration District and a last name at the same time. That will narrow the results. But if you just want to snoop around in an area, don't limit it except by Enumeration District.
A couple of things I discovered about my neighborhood and house from snooping around:
- It was extremely common for households in my neighborhood to have someone living with them who was labeled as a "lodger" by the census taker. I assume this would be defined as an unrelated person who was paying rent to the head of household. This is part of why Saint Paul used to have a significantly higher population than it does now, in addition to larger average family sizes.
- My house, however, was home to only a set of parents and their 19-year-old daughter. Given the parents' ages and the size of the house, I assume she was a youngest child, the last one remaining at home.
- The 60-year-old father was a salesman for a food manufacturer who had worked 54 hours the week before. The daughter was a "comptometer" who worked 40 hours for a paper company. The mother was a homemaker (or whatever "h" means on the form.)
2 comments:
Super-clear instructions, DN3. Thank you.
I’ve been snooping around in earlier census records, and gosh am I grateful to people who had good handwriting — and who wrote the street name down the left margin.
My grandmother is listed in 1950 as what looks like a “comtomtoa operator” — and your post clears it up! I had to use an exclamation point to tell you that.
Happy to help! (Exclamation point.)
The census-taker for my Enumeration District in 1950 had pretty good handwriting with some interesting, though fairly consistent, quirks. The one that stumped me the longest is that their lower case "r" looks like a "t" half the time; the other half the time, they write it as a small upper case "R."
Given how long the comptometers were around, it surprises me that they have completely dropped from memory. I'm willing to bet that it has something to do with the fact that it was women who operated them.
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