 Hello and welcome to this National Archives presentation. I'm so pleased to be speaking today with all of you who are spending some time with us. I'm hosting today a conversation with some of the country's leading librarians, three specialists in the study of genealogy and family history. My name is Dan Bauch. I'm a historian at Colgate University in Upstate New York and I'm the author of the book, Democracy's Data, the Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census, and How to Read Them. We are convened here today by the National Archives and I want to begin by thanking all of the folks who are making this entire presentation possible at the National Archives. Thank you so much. I'll turn the conversation over to our experts in a moment. But first I want to say a few words of introduction about the reason that we're here. Thank you for listening. I imagine you're aware that in April of this year, the National Archives released a treasure trove of historical data. We now have access to every single census sheet that was completed in 1950, enumerating over 150 million people, sheets that contained 3 billion answers to the government's questions. Those records provide a glimpse into the lives of Americans after the close of the Second World War at the dawn of the Cold War, at the beginning of a period of immense growth and change for the nation. They also offer us new knowledge about our families, ancestors, and communities. And that I think is what brings many of us here today. We've assembled our panel of experts to talk about 1950 census records and how they can get us started telling stories about our families and putting those stories in context, weaving them together into the stories of places and communities. Before I turn it over to them, I'd like to invite you to all look closely at a census sheet with me. So I'm going to share my screen here. This is a sheet that was selected by my fellow panelist Elizabeth Hodges of the Genealogy Center at Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She'll return to the sheets later in our program. Now I want us to think about where it came from and how it was made. This sheet was one of millions mass printed according to the specifications of the Census Bureau and their officials just outside of Washington, DC. The sheet then made its way in a large portfolio to a local census taker. We see her handwriting all over the sheet and her signature in the upper right hand corner. Here I've made it a little bit bigger that looks to me like either Patricia S. Mahon or possibly McLean. We're going to go with Mahon for now. Mahon was one of about 150,000 people crisscrossing the country counting for the census, asking questions, having conversations. Every census sheet like this one is a record of a series of conversations that were had and sometimes two conversations that were not had. Patricia Mahon, for instance, did not manage to talk to these folks. We see that she has mentioned here not at home with a little note 3. The note sections here in the 1932 census can be really, really wonderful. Here in note 3 she notes why she didn't have this conversation. It was because of bad dogs. When I read a sheet like this, I picture her making her rounds. I imagine those angry hounds barking and braying in a not so welcoming fashion, leading Mahon to think, perhaps I will put these forms in the mail rather than attempting to get to this door, but then moving on to the next house where she'll have a series of conversations. There's all sorts of drama like this lurking in each of these census sheets, and so many mysteries waiting for us to investigate. Today I am joined by some folks who have the knowledge and the resources to help make such investigations possible. I'd like to ask them now to each introduce themselves and their institutions. I'm going to stop my share. Elizabeth, could you introduce yourself first? My name is Elizabeth Hodges. I am a senior librarian at the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library, which is in Fort Wayne, Indiana. For those of you who might not be familiar with our library, our library, well, the Genealogy Center specifically, is the largest public collection of genealogy resources in the country. So as far as our collection goes, our collection includes about 1.2 physical items. That's going to be books, microfilm, microfiche. It is not limited to Indiana by any means. We collect for all over the country, North America. We have things for Europe as well. And then if we're to add in our digital collection in total, it will be a little bit more than 6 million items. So it's a massive collection. And our goal, our kind of unofficial mission statement here, is to help make people's research successful and help you find your family's story. And that's what I'm passionate about. So that's why I'm very happy to be here. Thank you. That's a great mission. Phil, could I have you introduce yourself next? Hello. I'm Phil Sutton. I'm a librarian in the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History and Genealogy. I've been here for 12 years now. We are located at the Stephen A. Schwartzman Building, which is the main branch in New York Public Library on 42nd and 5th Avenue. And I'm mostly concerned with reference and instruction and reference and instruction are a big part of what the librarians in my division do. As for collections, I think we've got about half a million books, about a quarter of a million different images, many of which have been digitized historic views of New York City. We also provide access through different divisions to digitized maps in New York. We offer classes, research guides online, online classes too. And we work with lots and lots of people from all over. A lot of people get in touch with us remotely and from overseas and the researching ancestors who are connected to New York but also connected to immigration because New York was the biggest point of immigration for many people. So that kind of diaspora spreads out from there. So we collect for the whole of the U.S. as well. And I'm not forgetting anything. Yeah, we're part of a much bigger research library. So we have the Jewish division. We have the archives division, maps division I mentioned already. All of these different divisions contain records and collections that people use in their research. And we're also a greater referrals. We refer to Allen County. We refer to the National Archives and the whole kind of information landscape in New York. So we can tell you if you're after a birth certificate in New York City we can tell you where you're going to find it. The potential here for remote work and remote access is both really amazing and illustrated here because we started in Indiana. We just popped over to New York for a moment and now we're going to fly across the country to Los Angeles. Bob, can you introduce yourself? Yes, my name is Bob Timmerman. I'm the senior librarian at the History and Genealogy Department of the Los Angeles Public Library. We are located in the Central Library downtown LA on Fifth Street. We are, again, similar to New York and Allen County, a large genealogy collection, large number of local histories, family histories, online resources. We've got four other different, finally different organizations of how things are collected, but we do have an extensive map collection and we have a California History section which can fill in for other peoples for trying to get the background for what was going on with their families in an area that changes quite frequently. Thank you. I hope that folks who are joining us watching this on YouTube will be able to use these libraries either directly or remotely in their own research. So I'm going to turn now to Elizabeth with my first invitation. Elizabeth, we know that many genealogical researchers begin with census records, but then what comes next after you find a person in a 1950 census record? Can you give us an example of how to use other resources to amplify what a census can tell us? So the census that I kind of wanted to use an example of how you can basically unpack a single document and try to get as much information out of it as possible and maybe how you can just find additional resources. So I am somebody who is interested in when I'm learning about a family, and I want to know more than just the names, the days where they lived, what they did for a living, but I like to figure out as much as possible. I think of it kind of like hoarding information. So what's beautiful about the 1950 census is the detail in the section regarding occupations. So this particular house that I have boxed in in red, that house is actually a house in Fort Wayne. It's in my neighborhood, so I'm familiar with the house. It is not a duplex, but by 1950 they were using it as a duplex, which is interesting. You have William H. Carter, who had purchased the house in 1922 and lived in the house until he passed away, and then his son, Herbert R. Carter, who lived in the house until he passed away in 1979, and they were renting the upstairs of the house to a family of four, the Wallings. Now I'm wondering how did these men know each other? How did they find these tenants for the upstairs of the house? And this house, I've been inside of it, it's not the type of house where they were just subdividing it. These two families had to be kind of shummy with one another just because of where doors are placed and where the staircase is. And we can see that the two men, they both worked as clerking and sales and distribution for a truck manufacturer. So I'm like, okay, truck manufacturer. This is the Midwest, right? There are a lot of factories here. So I decided to then look at the city directory and see is there more information. So I looked at the 1950s city directory. We see here, Herbert R. Carter, he's a clerk, and there is an abbreviation. It's super small, but this abbreviation is for International Harvester, which was the name of the company. So me being someone who oversees our digital collection, I'm like, oh, we have things for International Harvester. So I then popped over to our digital collection and I started looking through photographs. We have employee publications. And also when you're looking at things like this, you can even think, okay, well, maybe they were at a union. So it's something that just kind of snowballs over time. Will you find something that's necessarily super, super specific to your family? Not necessarily. You might not necessarily find like a union membership list. But this can then just add to the story, add a little bit more color to the story because these are things that they're going to be interacting with with their daily lives. So that's kind of what I did. But when you're looking at something like the census, it's all about asking a question. So what did you want to know? And in this case, I wanted to know, what did they do for a living? Where were they working? What was that like? But you can find, there's so many questions you can ask. Thank you, Elizabeth. That's a great way to get us started here. I mean, thinking both about the way in which the research falls, but also I think that's really such an important point that when we look into these resources, we might have to find the name of the person we're looking for, but we can come to understand the circumstances, the setting of what, in which they're living. So Phil, I want to turn to you next. When a researcher comes to you with a census sheet and asks about the next steps and what resources to turn to, what do you tell them? Can you briefly talk us through some of the options? Do we have the next slide? Oh yeah, here we go. I mean, typically, if I go back a little bit, and Elizabeth alluded to this, genealogy research is about formulating questions, deciding where you want to go. If you want to trace your pedigree or lineage, and you're in the United States, maybe you will start with finding an ancestor who's in the most recent census. And then work backwards and trace your family. You've got someone in the 1950s census who's six years old, they're living with their children. Maybe you want to go back to 1940, 1930, 1920, and so on, and trace that person's parents as children with their parents. And back as far as you can go. And that's a great way to build a framework, to build a pedigree chart to start organizing your information. And Elizabeth again alluded to that. It can be a little bit chaotic. You need to organize your mind with questions and organize your information in some way, whether using family group charts or pedigree charts. But also part of the research process is to examine information very closely, as a historian would do. And to look for clues. And this chaotic slide you see before you, it's actually taken from the 1920 census, but this can work for any census, is to read that census for clues about more information, because genealogy is about matching records, well, it's about posing questions and then finding the records that will answer those questions. And the census is full of lots and lots of clues about your family history. So you're going to get the names and addresses, relationships, information about who lives in the neighborhood, whether they own property, what their education is, marital status, immigration status, things like that, that can provide clues to lots of other records. So an address in the census, as we've seen, can be checked in a city directory. It can also be used to place people in a photograph, a historical photograph, or on some kind of map or something like that. As you build up, I guess we move from genealogy, the pedigree chart where you're linking names to the family history, where you're actually fleshing everything out and exploring the history of your family and the neighborhood and the context and the setting and all of these things. So where do they go next? It's kind of up to the researcher, like what do you want to know? What's your next step? But I would say if you're looking at the 1950 census and it's the first record you've ever looked at, if you've already spoken to your family and started thinking about the research that you want to do, the direction you want to go in, then go to the 1940 census, the 1930 census. And then when you've done that, then maybe start looking at some other records and build up a story. Great. Thank you so much. So we thought about these census records as recordings of a doorstep conversation and encounter between neighbors. That's how I got it started. And now we've considered how they could be used to provide a foothold for further investigations into the lives of people from the past. And like as Phil just said, to think about this as moving from constructing a genealogy towards constructing a family history, one that places these families into context. So I wonder if we could explore that a little bit further and think now about the way that census records over time can help us to think about whole neighborhoods and communities and about how those places change. Bob, can I turn to you and ask you to talk about that? Sure. So this is our 1940 census and this is for the neighborhood of Boyle Heights. This is on the east side of Los Angeles. And yes. And at that time we took a sampling basically of the neighborhoods. This neighborhood has historically always been an area of more recent immigrants to the United States. It has been a multi-ethnic area. It has gone through various time periods of being a predominantly Irish area, judging by the name of Mr. Boyle founding it. It was also predominantly Jewish area. And then in 1940 it was very much a mixed bag. It was a collection of people that, of ethnic groups that don't really, aren't really found in different parts of Los Angeles now. So the communities with the records that have the red dots on them were ones that we sampled. We went from the 1940-1950 census and most of these people are on a street called Fresno Street around where they intersect with East Second Street. So you can see in this one, I don't know if all 16 are showing here, but we sampled 16 houses of that group. Six were U.S. born, labeled as just white. Five were born in Japan and one the U.S. born Japanese person. One person born in Italy, one person born in Mexico and two born in Greece. So if I could just picture the area here. So yes, it's just this neighborhood here. And actually if you went on Google Street, you would see it actually pretty much, this is an area of LA that has not changed very much and you would still find houses from that area. So I need to say between 1940 and 1950, the city of Los Angeles had a great deal of change, both most of it sparked, of course, by World War II. So from the area now, the Japanese community, mostly almost entirely due to the Japanese incarceration, they stopped from there being sex households to being two, both just being U.S. born, no native born Japanese. The U.S. born white families, state of the thing from six to five, the families born in Mexico increased from one to eight. And this is now what Boyle Heights is. It's sort of now remained as sort of the center for primary areas for Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. We can check some of the records. Some of them don't show up on here that you can read, but one person answered his name in the 1940 census as Ralph Gonzalez. And then in 1950, apparently either emboldened by having more neighbors or perhaps better census taker, he used his, as soon as his actual name, which was Rafael Gonzalez, so that was a definite change because his entire block became, went from being a mixture of people from Italy, Mexico, Japan, to being all entirely resident people who were born in Mexico. So the city just, in this area has changed again. The Japanese communities did return to Los Angeles, but they became, they were more spread out. And after the war, those areas became a bit more centralized in a few smaller neighborhoods and the city is, in this area again, we continue probably in the 1960 census, you would again see more people with Mexican birthplaces or Spanish last names. Bob, that's really fascinating to think about. Well, I mean, to see this thing, which I think our folks who have been doing research will probably recognize the way that names change over time, having to do with all kinds of factors, having to do with what an enumerator writes down, with the way in which our names are so socially constructed, by the way, in which others refer to us in our communities. So that's a really interesting point. But also just to think about how, looking at across census, across decades, can allow us to think about how our families, how their neighborhoods were changing and how the people around them were changing, the people around them were moving through large political factors because of government operations, like in this case, the Japanese incarceration, and then think about how, as they're just making their way in their daily lives, they're moving through changing communities. Now, Phil, I understand that you have a story that you can share with us about a community that is also facing really dramatic changes. Do you want to go ahead? I think you're muted, Phil. So I was expecting the San Juan Hill slide to come up. Is that going to come up later? Let's see. There we go. Oh, actually, go back one. There we go. Okay. San Juan Hill, I mean, talking about changing neighborhoods, this is something that happens in New York a lot. And it's kind of, sometimes you have to follow, if you want to follow the community, you follow them around New York, living in different parts of New York. And some communities have gone. So actually, we could go quickly to the previous slide. Sorry about that. This is a census that, sorry, the one, yeah, got it. Okay, sorry. So I'm interested in, and a lot of people are in a community called Seneca Village, which is on the site of Central Park. It's a community set up in the 1820s by free African-Americans in New York. And it was joined later by Irish and German immigrants, and they lived there until the properties were built, sorry, the head churches and houses there. And then that community was, everyone was bought out through Eminem Domain, and the community was flattened and people had to relocate. And Central Park was built on the site of that. And so I've been trying to research the descendants. This is the wrong way to do gene allergy research. Usually you're looking for the ancestors, and you're going back through time, but sometimes you're in a situation where you have to go forward through time, which is much harder. But I was interested in the Wilson family who lived in Seneca Village. And I've just been trying to trace descendants of those because this is a big project in New York, various historians are into that at the moment. I've been doing this for several years. So I'm looking for the descendants of William Godfrey Wilson, who was the sextant church. I think it's in Seneca Village, a church that was lifted and removed across outside of Central Park. The community was roughly on the 80s, 80th to about 90th on the west side of what is Central Park now. And so I try to trace the descendants. So this is communities that were raised and landscape that's changed and almost like building history. I've made my way up to 1950, still looking for Peter H. Wilson, who's the grandson of William Godfrey Wilson, to try and follow this African-American community and see if they're still in New York. But if we can move to the next slide, talking about Eurasia, if we go back. This one? Okay, this is it. Right, okay. So Eurasia and other communities. So I was interested in San Juan Hill, which is if anyone's a fan of West Side Story or has been to the Lincoln Center at any point, this is an area that was raised in the late 50s and a lot of communities were moved away, had to move away, and the whole area was redeveloped and is quite different now. But it's a community started by Irish immigrants in the 19th century, and then a lot of African-Americans lived there and a lot of Puerto Rican people lived there, and other communities too. We can move to the next slide. And so I'm interested in San Juan Hill, and this is a part of it. This is a part on Amsterdam Avenue. This is from a collection of photographs taken by Percy Loomis-Spur, who took a lot of photographs from New York Public Library in the 1930s. In the 1930s, the library was very interested in changing New York, so it took lots and lots and lots of pictures of tenement buildings and neighborhoods that are no longer there. And this is an area I just kind of picked at random from San Juan Hill in photographs in our collections. I just wanted to look at who lived in these buildings. So exploring the landscape, building history is a huge subject in local history, especially here in New York. So we go to the next slide. So this is that area there. These are the tax lot photographs that you can get from the municipal archives. These are actually digitized online now. You can look at the tax lot photographs taken by the Department of Finance. Late 30s to early 40s of every developed lot in New York City, the five boroughs. So you can look up your ancestors' house in 1940 if they're living in one. And we also digitized lots and lots of fire insurance maps. And these are the maps that show these buildings here. And we can see these five-storey tenement buildings with businesses out in the front. And this is the map from 1956. This whole area, of course, is gone now. It's the Lincoln Center in places like that in that area. So I went to the 950 census to look up the people that were living in these tenement buildings. And that should be the next slide. And I just kind of dipped in, really. I wanted to see who's living in this little bit of San Juan Hill. And this is, you know, when history, you know, and family history and local history will all kind of intersect. And for us, you know, for anybody, it really become much more interesting. So I went to the census and I looked up some of the people that were living in these buildings and to get the addresses. But before that, I went to the telephone address directories. Telephones are becoming slightly more common after World War II. So the 950 census is going to show that. It is a rather, rather, the 950 telephone directory might show more people owning telephones even though they don't ask that. And I just wanted to know what were all the businesses on the first floor of this building, of this lot. And so I can see these businesses are long gone now, looking in the directory, Green Gables Restaurant, Old Dutch Launderers, McCoy's Restaurant, Leshians Market, Ernie's Bakery, Dan's Grocery, Amsterdam Pharmacy, all these kind of small family business, independent businesses. And I also look in the directory. I noticed that a bunch of different people, a few people that were living in these addresses had telephones. Going back to the 950 census, I love the 950 census because it shows apartment numbers. It's very difficult before 950 to find apartment numbers listed. You'll see them in some city directories, but not in the census. The 50 census asked that. And this is amazing because then we can, because people want to know, where did my ancestors to live? I know this building is still there, but what floor did they live on? Who lived in my apartment? Kind of a great massive addition that's really important for New York. So I looked at two families. I looked at John Petronas, who was born in Puerto Rico, lived on 63 Amsterdam Avenue. He was 44, married to Providence, was 39. They lived on the third floor in apartment 3N. And I know that they had, that was on the north side of the building, which suggests that they had a window facing out on Amsterdam Avenue, because Amsterdam Avenue runs from north to south. So already I'm getting a little insight into what's going on. I can see, you know, they've got, the rest of the family are listed. So, but John Providence and their oldest child, John Jr., were born in Puerto Rico. They arrived in New York sometime before their son Herbert was born in about 1932. And John and Providence have four other children, Francis, 17, Helen, 14, Ralph, 12, and Rose, 3. And both John and John Jr. work at a drugstore lunch net. Now that could be in the previous photograph. We could see a drugstore that was 10 years previously, but maybe they're still there in 1950, and they're working in that drugstore. And so that's an interesting story. So that's just one family I'm dipping in. You know, I could go, I could trace that family in this building, or I could go back in time and look at who lived in this building in 1940. But I'm just kind of interested in, you know, who was living in this community roughly around the time that all these buildings were demolished. So I go next door, and I want to see who the neighbors there are. So the neighbors are Michael Hickey, 36, and his wife, Margaret, is 35. And their extended family. They have five sons, Daniel, John, Patrick, Thomas, and William, who is seven through 16. They have their daughter, Mary, who's four, and Michael's three sisters, Phyllis, Mary, and Catherine, who are 20 through 15. Everyone is born in New York, apart from Michael, who's born in Ireland. And, you know, reading the census as a genealogist, that tells me basically that Michael probably came to this country with his parents sometime between, you know, 1914 and the late 1930s. That's going to point to naturalization records. We can see he's naturalized Michael Hickey here. And that row asks, are you naturalized? Are you a citizen? So I'm going to go looking for his naturalization records because what's really important for lots of people, especially people researching their Irish ancestry is place of origin. So, you know, the 50 census is going to lead me to different documents. So I'm going, we're going back to question one now, I guess. Also, he's a member that he's a patrolman in the NYPD. Lots of people want to know about ancestors who's, they're ancestors who were policemen. And we, as a referral, a unit that refers a lot as a division, the library that refers people a lot, you know, we can refer you to different places that you would go researching that vacation. And I also noticed that Hickey, Michael Hickey has a telephone. There are two telephones in the building he lives in. There are a couple of telephones in the building next to that. But if we go across the street, I'm looking in the directory, really everybody has a telephone. My next question is what's going on across the street, you know, that in 1950, why is this so different? That was a kind of a long-winded tale. No, thank you. What's really so interesting in both these sets of stories is to think about how when we're looking at the stories of our ancestors or we're thinking about these numerators wandering through these neighborhoods, we might find that their community has just changed around them without them moving. They might have moved their whole community, they might have moved with their entire community to a new location or a new space. And these are all kind of stories we can tell, but we can only tell them if we're looking not just at our individual records, but trying to look at the whole community, the whole place, the people around each of these folks. So we're coming close to the close of our formal presentations and then we'll shift to answering some of your questions if you want to put them in on the YouTube stream. Or we might discuss some of the ideas that each of our experts have raised. But first, I want to turn back to Elizabeth and back to this census sheet that we began with, the one with Patricia Mahon or McLean and with those bad dogs. Elizabeth, can you explain what brought this sheet to your attention and why it's special? So when the 1950 census came out, one of the things I wanted to do was immediately find all of my ancestors that would have been alive in 1950, including my father. So that's kind of a good thing to remember about the 1950 census. It's recent enough to where there will still be people alive who appeared on that census. And also, the people who are appearing on the census that might not be alive anymore, it's not that long ago in the grand scheme of doing genealogy, 1950, not that long ago. So you can ask questions. And one of the things that I really love about the 1950 census is the stories that come out when you find someone on the census and then you ask your family members, hey, why is this person living with this person? So the example I wanted to show was my adoptive great-great-grandmother, Winifred Crump. So I'm originally from the New Orleans area, so the census is from New Orleans. She was living in the French Quarter. She worked at Sears. She was a sales lady. And by that point, her husband had passed away just a couple years prior, so she's a widow. She's 64. And there's this man, Kent Parsons, and his daughter, Sarah, living with her. And I see this, and it lists his relation to her as partner. I'm like, what? So I asked my mother, because my mother was very close with Winifred. Winifred lived to be very elderly, so my mother has very fond memories of her. And she said, oh, Kent, yes. He talked Winifred Crump into cashing in her pension, handing over her stocks to him, because he met her supposedly at Sears. He was a nice-looking man. He's from Honduras, so is his daughter. He gave Winifred this very sad story about how he's trying to come to America, and she just gave him all of her money. She was known as being a very sweet and generous woman. There were various people in the family who felt that she was being taken advantage of. I mean, they were living with her in a very small apartment in the French Quarter, which was kind of peculiar. But what's also kind of interesting to note is that Sarah, the daughter who's 17 at the time, she became best friends with my grandmother. And they were very, very close. My great-grandfather, so my grandmother, whose name was also Winifred, her father was Creole, so she was a woman who was darker-complexed, and apparently both Sarah and Winifred would go places together. People think that they were sisters, and my grandmother just thought that was so great because she looked to nothing like her actual sister, who looked very white, frankly. So it's a very bizarre story that no one would have ever told me had I not just happened to find this and just ask. So what's really beautiful about the census, about this particular census, is that you can ask those questions of the people who are still alive. So it opens the door for learning more stories. And this particular census sheet is interesting, and partially because of the persons, them being from Honduras. So as someone who personally, I'm originally from New Orleans, do you know a certain amount about the history of the city? In post-World War II, you started to get a large influx of people immigrating from Honduras and Guatemala as well. And there's since then been a very strong Honduran community, and a lot of that had to do with United Fruit Company, which would go down to South America. So it would go to Columbia, it would go to Honduras, and a couple of other places, and then it would stop in New Orleans. And because of that connection, you had more and more people immigrating from Honduras, and this is an interesting reflection of that. And also this census, as I said, this is the French Quarter. People who work at Sears, they can't afford to live in the French Quarter present day. This is a very expensive place to live, a lot of Airbnb's, even though I think they're technically illegal inside the French Quarter, but people do them. It's kind of a snapshot in time of what the French Quarter used to be. It used to be a very residential place, and not so much anymore. So yeah, there are a lot of layers to kind of unravel with this, but my big thing is learning those stories that I wouldn't have learned otherwise. I mean, that's such a fascinating story, again, full of so many mysteries, but also just that this record here provides a kind of question to you, like, what's up here? And you can ask, we can investigate this by looking and talking to our, looking for other resources, and a spur to talking to relatives to then let these stories spool forth with, again, complicated questions there, like some people thinking that Kent's taking advantage, and other people thinking that this ends up being a wonderful relationship between Winifred and Sarah, and... She sponsored Kent's wife and daughter to emigrate. So my mother believes I haven't proven that yet, but that's what my mother told me this morning, that she believes that Winifred was their sponsor as well, and they met at Sears. And I just said, well, why her? Why him? And she said, well, he was attractive. He was a good-looking man, and he was very personable. I guess so. Very charismatic. I saw there that it listed married for Kent, and so I was curious what the story was there. Yeah, I mean, the other thing that I, this record has a, besides the Barking Dogs, is a soft spot for me because this partner label is also someone that has fascinated me a great deal, is one of the, somebody asked me about this in the 1940s since a long time ago, and I wrote a whole chapter in my book about this partner label, and precisely because it's, when you see a partner, it often means that a really interesting story. It can be a way in which queer households identify themselves, but it's also often a way where just otherwise can't be counted, place themselves within a household. And the census is ultimately, a census not of people, but of households that counts people in households. So I think that's really interesting. I asked my mother, you know, what do you think partner is supposed to mean here? And she's like, maybe they're romantically related, maybe they're business partners, but she's like, he wouldn't be a lodger because he never paid her rent. Mm-hmm. And that might be, you know, Maria was like, I don't know what to call you, so. The single, most partners that I found in the 1940 census were not in the, in the, part of the United States officially, but were in the territorial census in Hawaii, and it was partners where people were living in work camps of men, single men usually living in work camps in Hawaii would be then labeled as partners, but we find partners in all kinds of different spots coming in clumps, but you won't find any of them in the published census records, which is the other interesting thing. They are all erased and just reported as lodgers. So it's only in these records that these particular mysteries show up. So I am going to, I'm going to open us up for conversation and questions. And so I'm going to post some questions, but I'm also going to invite folks to jump in with any other. If you want to piggyback on any of the points that our fellow experts have raised, I want to open that up. One of the things that we do as from YouTube, and I want to continue to invite people to send us questions, is about, let's see, the, the kind of cross-national uniformity of this. So the question is a one-level basic question. Are people throughout the United States filling out the same census forms, or do they end up having differences? And one way of saying that is maybe we could ask the question, are they filling out the same form? Or maybe do they fill out the same way, uniformly across the United States? Or do we see differences in how people fill out the forms? Or what kind of information that shows up on these forms? Does anyone want to jump in? I don't mind. I mean, I'm probably going to just regurgitate things I read in your book, Dan, which is a very good book, by the way, everybody. It's a real census nerd book. So I can recommend it. I guess, you know, it's what you talk about in your book about, I guess, navigating the form, because there's a conversation between the census taker who's going to bring all their biases and their opinions and maybe their terrible handwriting or their laziness or their incredible handwriting or their absolute commitments to the job. It just depends on the numerator and how that information is collected and how it fits into these little boxes. And you're right. It's difficult. I mean, the term partner does crop up a lot here and there. And I can only imagine that the census taker is going through their instructions, which you can look at online. I'm blanking. IPUM, Dan? Yeah, IPUM. IPUM. See, just Google IPUMs and there's enumerator instructions. And you can see that maybe the enumerator is wrestling with that information and doesn't quite know how to put it in the box. I mean, I think there's all sorts of reasons. The census is, you know, because this is the last census really that's completely collected by enumerators and is an oral document, a recording of a conversation and thoughts that are in the head of the person that's answering the questions as well. I wonder how much time do they have to fill out this census and what's the situation when that interview is taking place? I've seen photographs of a census taker on a doorstep talking to somebody you might describe as a housewife and as a small child playing at their feet. And the housewife is kind of like, she's got this kind of look of like, yeah, can we get this done? And then it's like, who's remembering what? And so, I guess sometimes when, to simplify this, we refer to the census to a, you know, researchers, beginner researchers as, you know, like a Wikipedia article. It really helps if you don't look at the census in isolation, it's really important that you examine the evidence before you and closely read it, but compare it to other records and then come back and look at it after you've looked at those other records. But yeah, you've really got to think about why does this record exist? What is the history of this record and why and how was it filled out and what shaped it? I love that response, you know, because it's all up to the enumerator, as you said, Phil, and I mean, there are certain biases with the enumerators as well. I can only imagine what a potentially white enumerator who might be a bit racist is what he's thinking or she's thinking when going through an African-American community in 1950 in the Jim Crow South. So there's a certain level of biases there. I like to remind people also when they're starting out doing genealogy, spelling doesn't count in genealogy. So if, you know, the enumerators, they're not asking how to spell your name, I think some of the exceptional ones might be. If you have a little bit of an accent, right, if you're an immigrant from Germany or Italy or maybe you're from Puerto Rico or something and English is not necessarily your first language, maybe you don't speak English at all, the enumerator's going to write down what they hear. So, yeah, I mean, as far as the forms go, yes, with the exception of like the infant cards, the things that we can't get to, which we had the infant cards, but aside the point. Aside from that, yes, technically, the instructions are the same, but whether or not the enumerators who are people and people are problematic at times, whether or not they're following all of them to the T, it depends, but that's human nature. Yeah, that's great. I want to note for people that they can find enumerator instructions on the Census Bureau's website, and then they're also for, you can talk to your librarians and you can find procedural histories for each of the censuses that explain how each of the censuses took place, which can send some light, again, on how they were supposed to happen, but then what you'll find in the census record again are these full of mysteries of these people interacting with one another. Now, somebody noted in the chat that, and this is correct, that if you're looking in the 1950 census, you notice some records that are of a different form than the ones we've been showing, and that's particularly around, I think, it's Detroit, or maybe it's Lansing in Michigan, and then I think also around Columbus in Ohio, and what's happening there is you're seeing individual forms for individual families. This was a Census Bureau test to see what would happen if people were allowed to enumerate themselves instead of asking the questions of an enumerator. Here you'll find separate forms for each household, not this kind of paper form. That points to something that Phil alluded to, which is that this 1950 census is special for a number of reasons. It's the last one that isn't primarily self-enumeration in which individuals are filling out the material themselves, and it's also the last one where all people answer so many big questions. Notice even on these 1950 forms, if I can show us here, about two-thirds of the form is filled in by what are called sample questions at the very bottom, extra information about individuals. This was a procedure begun in 1940 that started to allow more questions to be asked and more information to be gleaned, but over time, from 1960 on, the number of questions asked of everyone continues to shrink while the number of questions asked of a small sample of the population grows. This will be for people constructing their family histories a very sad thing to understand because it means that the 1950 census is probably the last of our really deep censuses in which for every single person we'll have a lot of different kinds of information. Bob, did you want to answer it all? Oh, sorry. The form you're referring to is the one that's P2, I think. I think I'm pretty sure, yeah. But those who want to Google that later. Yeah, okay. Thank you. Oh, and I was just going to mention that in the the difference of the census stakers when I checked, you know, from... the landrew went from Ralph Gonzalez to Rafael Gonzalez. Also in 1940, he's the only person with a, you know, Spanish last name with a Spanish surname. And by 1950, there's so many on the block that, you know, and I'm looking at them and nearly all the names look to be, you know, spelled correctly. And you also have to assume that in those intervening 10 years, it's possible that Rafael is also English-improved and he's also able to answer the census taker much better. He would probably be much more conversant in English to make sure that his name was entered correctly by the enumerator. Yeah, I think that's such a powerful point when we look at these census records to think of them as not only the product of a conversation between an enumerator and the person who's being enumerated, but shaped so powerfully by the assumptions of the community that that enumerator is bringing with them and by the other kinds of people, the way that other people identify themselves are all going to shape the way enumerators then fill out these forms and that's going to shape then how what you end up learning about your families or about your ancestors. So we have a couple more questions here from the chat that I'm going to bring forward. One I'm going to put out here is a factual question for the librarians of how to find a resource and then I'm going to jump to a bigger question about things that might have surprised you as you've encountered the 1950 census with working with people. This one is just how would I find my great-grandmother's social security application, someone who died in 1970? Where do we go to find social security application records? Anyone want to take a shot at that? There's the death index to start with. Yeah, we start with the death index so you know the number and you use the death index to find their information. There's also applications that have been transcribed, well, kind of indexed I guess is a better description in a database like Ancestry. I think a question like that because when a question catches a librarian on the hop, after 12 years I've learnt to say I don't know. Shall we look together? I didn't take me 12 years. But I would suggest if you're getting into the details of you've got a detailed research question like that to email any one of the three libraries. Our email is history at mypl.org because maybe stick that in the chat or something. I don't know how that might work. But yeah, so the Milstein division answers helps with questions like that because it's difficult to know everything because genealogy is such detective work there's so many records out there and the kinds of records that will answer the kinds of questions. A reference exchange in genealogy is different from other reference exchanges with librarians and patrons because it's an ongoing back and forth like I want this record what do you want to see in that record as well is important. Sometimes a record isn't a silver bullet that's going to answer all your questions. Sometimes it's another record that you need. There is a way to get at this information the social security information bar. Google it. Google it. Google is your friend. Google is your friend. People think librarians are magic. We just have very excellent keyword searching abilities. So basically you look up the name in the social security death index get the number and then you can make a FOIA request with the social security office. If you do a Google search for social security applications in genealogy it's the first link that comes up. The other thing to bear in mind is when you're looking at these index results in something like Ancestry or Family Search go to the section of the page that describes the record the source of the record because I think Ancestry actually has information and if you open it up it explains how you can go about applying for that. The process there too of how we get to the information I think that was terrific. So we've got about five minutes left here and I think that's perfect for this so this will be our final question. We're asked I'm really interested to hear this too can you tell us about some of the surprises that you've encountered working with the 1950 census as people have started to do this research either in your own research or as you've had patrons is there anything that has surprised you as you've been doing that work? I haven't just surprised about how streets which I think I've taken for granted here don't well existed in much different forms in 1950 when I'm looking at people are and it's like where is this on the map and I just get out our current day map and it's like well it's not. I would imagine for LA especially that would be such a remarkable set of changes. Yeah. It's like there's a freeway there sorry you know. Elizabeth did you have a comment? Yeah. So one I just love seeing how the community changed living in some of these communities but in my own research finding my father on the 1950 census was much harder than it needed to be and that's because he kept telling me oh we were living in this place this address in 1950 he's like oh not there well maybe it was this one which is like one neighborhood like one little enumeration district over not there either well and then he was saying oh well maybe we're at Camp Poche which for context Camp Poche it was used as like a staging area the New Orleans area during World War II and then after the war it was temporary GI housing it's like yeah we were in this like basically GI shack for a little while around that time maybe we were there they were in none of those places they were in Florida with my great grandparents and I'm just like what were you doing in Florida and my dad thought about it he's like what was the date I tell him when I was enumerating he's like oh my grandfather was a photographer he did horse racing photography and he's like it's during the off season so he was leaving us in Florida so he could go to a race track in Canada to go work in Canada for a little while so that's why we were there you could have saved me some time like a day and a half looking at the sheets because it was before it was the index was better the index was better I think with me it's been less about surprises it's more been about navigating the census just finding people because you know the initial release and I remember when the 1940 census was released it was the same thing it's just like finding addresses I was looking for an address for my actually this is a 19 we don't have enough time I have a great story about how my wife's grandfather it's not great it's a dramatic story about how he was kidnapped and I found out this by looking at newspapers trying to find an address so I could search the census by address before it had been indexed by the big companies and his name was everywhere in the news stories strangely his address was also in the newspapers which was weird because it was a big court case for kidnapping going on he'd been kidnapped but that's for another time but yeah it's helping people navigate the census searching you know my mother in law was trying to find she was a tiny baby in 1950 she was trying to find herself in the census she couldn't find herself so I went back to the old way we used to do it we not me but older people used to do it before things were digitized you know you get the address you find the enumeration district number you scroll through the census looking for that address and and so it's been it's been a lot of that of helping people navigate and find things in the census and I found with the 1940 census it took me a few years before I was really kind of like digesting everything and connecting making connections so I'm excited to see what other records does 1950 match up to yeah it's going to match up to the telephone directory and you know things like that but once we start grouping all these records together I think the 1950 census will really come to life so we've what we've learned so far today I think is that when we start making investigations in the census records we will find out about unexpected familial interconnections stories apparently even kidnappings and it'll take us even the experts years to really get to understand this new resource and so you dear family historians who have been joining us thank you for spending this time with us I hope that this is a invitation for you to spend a lot more time working with the 1950 census and I want to thank the National Archives and all the folks behind the scenes who've made this presentation possible and I want to thank my fellow panelists Elizabeth Hodges, Phil Sutton and Bob Timmerman thank you so much for joining us and I hope that everyone listening has many wonderful adventures in the census take care thank you