Wednesday, August 8, 2012

1940 census update

Hey all!  Just a quick update for now to keep you all interested!  This week we're celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday! I'll be sure to let you all know how that turns out after it's over but the prep for that has demanded much of my time to get things ready.  That being said I've had bits of time to work on my genealogy and am very happy to share that I am making great progress on locating my family members on the US 1940 census record.  I owe this largely in part to Ancestry.com as they have finished indexing all of the census records so I can now find those hard to located people by searching for their names.

On that note, for those of you who are newer to genealogy research don't get discouraged if when you first start looking for someone you can't find them.  I learned this that hard way after over-looking many documents because the name just didn't seem right.  Something as simple as the last name Huffman can be incorrectly indexed as Hofman or some other variation of that name.  Keep in mind that the people who are indexing many not always be able to read everything that was written.  Hand writing can be a very hard to thing to decipher so you should always take a second look at names that seem close to yours because they may have just been misread

I'm hoping the newly indexed 1940 census records will help me clear up some questions about family members and lead me closer to the things I want to find.  Hopefully I'll have more to update on next week after finding some more records and knocking some of these hints of my family tree.

Happy hunting genealogists!

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