28 March 2012
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From 2 April 2012 MyHeritage will be offering the images and a growing searchable name index of the 1940 US Census free of charge
From 2 April 2012 MyHeritage will be offering the images and a growing searchable name index of the 1940 US Census free of charge, following the release of the census by the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States (NARA). The census will be available in 38 languages, searchable even on-the-go via mobile, with automatic matching to family trees.
To coincide with the release of the census MyHeritage will be launching its SuperSearch search engine. MyHeritage will automatically match the 1940 Census records as they are being added with the millions of family trees built by users on MyHeritage, notifying them about relevant results and eliminating the need for time-consuming and repeated manual searches. Users will be able to approve or dismiss any matches before they are added to their tree. This could be a particularly useful aid given that the 1940 Census records will be added gradually, so users won’t need to revisit the census and search again as new content is added.
The MyHeritage 1940 Census index will be independent from the 1940 Census Community Project being coordinated by Archives.com, FamilySearch and findmypast.com, and from the Ancestry.com index. MyHeritage aims to add value by publishing data from states not yet available elsewhere and will use a specialist historical transcription company to develop the index and make it searchable, pledging a 98% or higher degree of accuracy.
MyHeritage will also provide the 1940 US Census for free on its other family history sites at www.worldvitalrecords.com/1940census and www.familylink.com/1940census.
In addition, users will be able to search the 1940 Census on-the-go with a new version of the MyHeritage mobile app for iPhone, iPad and Android, to be launched in the first week of April.
This is the most recent US census to be made publicly available (after a 72-year closure period) and is the largest and most comprehensive one ever to be published. It will provide a window into the lives of those who survived the Great Depression, and those who immigrated to America to flee from the Nazis in World War II. Census information includes detailed family information, such as names, ages, addresses, occupation, race, marital status, birthplace, citizenship, home ownership and the relationship of each person in the household. Several new and interesting questions appear in the 1940 US Census for the first time identifying where the individual was living five years before (in 1935), information about wages and also educational attainment. Five percent of the population was asked supplementary questions including birthplace of parents, native language, usual occupation, and for women only – whether they’d been married more than once, how old they were when they were first married and the number of children they gave birth to.