1950 Census Records
archives.gov
archives.gov
https://climbingmyfamilytree.blogspot.com/p/1950-census.html
One of the more interesting optional annotations: Enumerators could note if they thought the respondent was lying, and write down what they thought the truth was! (https://climbingmyfamilytree.blogspot.com/2020/01/extra-nota...)
As others have pointed out, FamilySearch will be indexing the records and making them available for free. It's a massive effort involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers plus a large investment in technology and other resources:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/info/1950-census-details
By comparison, Ancestry (now owned by Blackstone Inc.) will charge money to access these public records ... and this comes on heels of jacking up subscription prices across the board, up to 25% (https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/blog/were-increasing-our-...)
MyHeritage is also indexing 1950 records, but these will be paywalled like Ancestry.
edit: what you should be doing if you do have public library access to these sites, is you should be saving your records locally using software like Gramps or Zotero. Maybe both? I'm still learning the ecosystem but good genealogists depend on documentation, and documentation worth having is the documentation you keep safe locally.
They're not viewable because they only permit Mormons to view them.
The index is not useful because it only includes the name and not the additional information present on the vital document.
IMO FamilySearch is the worst of the 3 big genealogy websites.
Do you have a source for that? I'm not a Mormon, and can use the site without restriction, including viewing records from other countries. The site does not ask questions about religious affiliation when registering.
Regarding indexing: For some types of documents it's incomplete or the volunteer crew hasn't gotten around to it. I always check the original image when it's presented to get extra details.
For what it's worth, Ancestry has similar problems in its own index and the way it organizes some data. Some records are not viewable at all, just a very high-level index entry that reads more like a footnote.
I pay out the nose for Ancestry.com and also come across indexed data that isn't viewable. I suspect this is because the data was literally only indexed and not archived (yet?) photographically. Possibly the digital index was copied from a handwritten index, without access to the original documents. Fortunately for me all such data I've come across has been redundant, except for some Missouri marriage record data with conflicting dates--both sets of data were just from indices; the original records aren't viewable, which in this case I assumed--without evidence--was due to some privacy concerns given the records are from the 1960s.
> FamilySearch is the worst of the 3 big genealogy websites.
It's free! Plus, there's little I've been able to find on Ancestry.com and not FamilySearch. I think in one or two instances FamilySearch actually had better data. And on many occasions FamilySearch's presentation of data was easier to grok, making it easier to sift through data during the initial stages of a hunt.
A big pro for Ancestry.com is definitely non-U.S. databases, but at least in my case those databases are only relevant past 3-4 generations, at which point it becomes very difficult (at least for myself as an amateur) to have any confidence in associations without independent corroboration. (You'd be surprised how often names and dates line up coincidentally. In one case I found two candidate families where in addition to the parents 3 children in each family had the same names and similar birth years. It took me countless hours of sleuthing to be able to confidently rule one of the families out.) If you already have that extra bit of information, though, then the databases lose a little of their unique value. (Definitely worth it if you're serious, but most people aren't as invested as they think.) IME, the best value proposition of Ancestry.com is its popularity. There are multiple connections and facts I never would have been able to discover, let alone confirm, without information from family trees published on Ancestry.com. Specifically, trees from people in possession of physical records, or die-hard sleuths who traveled to tiny villages across the world to photograph religious records not available anywhere else. There are very few people who are willing and capable of putting in that sort of work (almost everybody simply copies subtrees from each other, which is a very dangerous thing to do if you care about accuracy--errors propagate like wildfire). Because of it's popularity you'll find more of those people on Ancestry.com than elsewhere.
Here's a page describing the available genealogical records from the Philippines and where you can find them: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Philippines_Online_Gene... In some cases, FamilySearch may have only the indexed (textual) data, and commercial providers may charge for access to the images.
FamilySearch provides free access to multiple commercial providers to anyone at family history centers in many locations (https://www.familysearch.org/fhcenters https://www.familysearch.org/fhcenters/locations/) These centers also provide free consultation and help with your genealogy research (sometimes even online free consultation).
FamilySearch has contracts with some of those commercial providers to grant church members free accounts, which I think is what ianhawes is describing. General access in those cases is available from the providers at their usual rates.
They even have teams filming and photographing records in some of the Ukrainian archives branches right now, even while under siege. They are serious about saving copies of world cultural history, it’s just that they emphasize family history.
Huge respect for their work.
And a big raspberry to their competitors that lock everything behind a paywall. I think one of them (ancestry) has exclusive deals with some states, so they have records you can't see without signing up.
They will sometimes make a free gateway portal to those records, where you input your in-state zipcode to get access, or some other nonsense like that. But they actually have the gall to say in their contracts that the digital files cannot be redistributed by the (public, taxpayer-funded) state or local archive. Funny, the state law says they can’t do that…
And so the non-profit I founded and run is starting to reclaim those public records, for the public, for free.
Excellent website and a great cause. I just donated.
Looks very nice BTW.
The Mormons are really good at this sort of thing. Really really good.
Also, it's trendy for a subset of angry people on the internet to hate the Mormons for various reasons, both real and imagined.
And, there is a very tiny, but very vocal, number of people who will not use any service that might be even tangentially related to a religion. They're afraid of getting Jesus cooties or something.
ps- sincere thanks to the LDS Temple letting me use their library and record search for many weeks, long ago
I used to be good like that, but since I've moved away from areas with high LDS populations, I've lapsed into just the word "Mormon" again. Probably because that's what I grew up with in a non-LDS region, so I don't automatically associate the word "Mormon" with bring critical of LDS.
It sounds like a distant relative of yours saw your contributions and assumed your were Mormon and wanted to make sure you had the chance to be the proxy for your ancestor before another relative did it for you. That's not required, it was just a common courtesy.
For clarity: I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon). I've also done development work on sites that used the FamilySearch API, I've served as an "ordinance worker" in the temple, and have done some of my own family history work on FamilySearch.
Then may I ask you about the provisions available to opt-out for baptism by proxy?
Is it possible to contact the church of LDS to refuse in advance, should any descendent (or proxy) convert, then want me baptized at any point in the future?
[Just in case it's not clear, that's a serious question.]
I'm asking while I'm alive because I won't be able to opt-out when I'm dead.
The doctrine of the church, however, is that even if a person is baptized by proxy it has no efficacy if the person in the afterlife chooses not to accept it. The agency to choose is a core belief, and we believe it is important for the individual to decide whether they want to be baptized or not.
I still understand your desire to not even have the ordinance done in the first place regardless of whether you believe it does anything, but like I said before I'm not aware of any way to "opt-out". I wish I could be more helpful.
Of course: it's just a question of consent and respect.
I respect your faith, I would hope mine would be respected too, which is why I do object to being engaged in a baptism even 1) after having very clearly expressed when I'm alive that I do not consent to that but 2) under the assumption that when I'm dead, if a descendant consents, my own consent is void and no longer matters!
> if the religion isn't true and it doesn't mean anything
My point is the exact opposite: if it's true and it means everything, then surely you can understand my rejection!
Let's look at that differently: imagine I belong to a different religious movement, and that we have an "antibaptism" that can retrospectively negate baptism, snatch your soul from wherever it may be, and send it on its way to our deity - or to oblivion, or to damnation, or to whatever feels uneasy and disturbing.
Would you not want to object to have that done do you, instead of saying it wouldn't matter when you're dead?
Even "if the religion isn't true and it doesn't mean anything", it may disturb you.
> I just am curious about the line of reasoning
I tried to explain in good faith my uneasiness with the practice.
I hope this answered your question.
some day you too could be a mormon.
This site has a way to look up the ED by street address:
https://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html
Depending on the street, there will be 1 or more districts; e.g.: "9-27", etc. Just enter that string in the "Enumeration District" search field. I knew the addresses of several relatives based on the 1940 census and it made looking them up in the 1950 census very easy.
The search box says "First and/or Last Name"
The tips at https://1950census.archives.gov/search/ say:
> Tip #1: Search for the first and last name of the head of household (plus state and county of residence if known) because the surname was written on the census form only on the line for the head of household and other persons in the household with a different surname.
> Tip #3: You don't have to know the exact spelling of a person's name in order to perform a name search. Enter as much as you know. The search engine will return any close variations or matches.
The FAQ also adds:
> Is there a name index to the 1950 Census? > Yes, researchers will be able to search the 1950 census by name. Please note that the name index will not be 100% accurate because it is based on optical character recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence/machine learning. The website will feature a transcription tool to enable users to submit name updates, which will improve the accuracy of the name index and make the records more accessible for everyone.
The machine learning is truly impressive, because some of the writing is hardly legible.
70 years is a very good amount of time , by the most of the people affected are dead, and the living can glace back into the past. Cool to see jobs being listed as well, you can trace a families path from poverty to affluence and perhaps vice versa.
EDIT - the Census would have been conducted in spring 1950, while the first troops arrived in July 1950. So presumably they would have been on military bases in the US and then perhaps counted in the census...
What if you don't want to volunteer your information?
70 years seems reasonable considering the lack of sensitivity of census information, and while rental records aren't public, property ownership records are and are frequently used as well for location information (FamilySearch indexes public property record information for ancestor location hints and other vital correlation [2]).
[1] https://www.archives.gov/research/immigration/aliens
[2] https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/United_States_Land_and_...
> This is the same reason FamilySearch (the Mormon genealogy application) is very aggressive about ensuring you properly mark subjects as deceased or not.
What if I want to ensure I will never be posthumously baptized?
https://deannaizme.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/mormons-and-post...
There may be an "opt out" by contacting the LDS, but them not having my information making that possible in the first place would guarantee the end result, far more than trusting them to keep their word!
And what about the next religious movement that tries to do the same?
I think we need an equivalent of the GPDR right to be forgotten. Some people care about their legacy? I don't! When I'm dead, I want to be scrubbed from all records, census included.
Society in general disagrees with you. Most think that people should have some level of privacy, but I have to think that privileging privacy over all other concerns is a pretty rare viewpoint. The kind of absolute privacy you desire has probably not been possible since the invention of writing.
Also, the European right to be forgotten is not a blanket "forget everything about everyone", but merely a way for a person to request that specific, old, embarrassing information about themselves be no longer published.
Not fully: when you are alive, you can write a contract to dispose of your goods when you die - say to give something to causes, people or even animals you hold dear: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02gift.html
I wish there was such a possibility to ensure your private information is disposed of in the way you want.
And while you are required to give answers to the census-taker, you are not required to give truthful answers. A significant number of my female relatives seemed to age very slowly or even in reverse through the decades…
I don't know how long the overall effort will take - but you can also participate as much as you like!