1940 US Federal Census release date?

First, the National Archives is going to release the census, either directly on their website, or on a 3rd party website, at 9 am, eastern time, on April 2nd, 2012. The census will not be name indexed, but will be searchable by location. Right now, NARA has online the 1940 census descriptions and 1940 census maps on their ARC catalogue.

I suggest you go through our tutorial at: http://stevemorse.org/census/quiz.php which will teach you and lead you through how to do locational searches for the 1940 census, using many different tools, to find people by location on this census.

Ancestry has announced that they will make available the 1940 images AND their name index starting in the middle of April, 2012. Since no name indexing will occur before the census becomes public, expect that states will be "rolled out" in terms of name indexes. The guess is that it will take 6 months before a full, complete name index is done. Ancestry indicated this will be available for FREE through 2013.

The FamilySearch group has announced they will coordinate a project to name index the 1940 census after it comes out. They will try to involve their own volunteers, and genealogy societies in this effort...and this will be free.

Thus you can be preparing for the release by finding locations of relatives, and with the Morse "One Step" website, translating those locations into Enumeration District numbers, so you can immediately go to the right census district for an address on April 2nd, 2012. If you don't have a location, you are just going to have to wait until a name index is done for your target area.

Joel Weintraub

http://members.cox.net/census1940/

Each federal census is released 72 years after they record it, so the 1940 Census will be released April 2nd, 1940. Ancestry.com will work on indexing and scanning to their website the same month.

Familysearch.org is also a popular genealogy research website, I'm guessing they will start scanning ASAP and rely on their volunteers to index it, which would take longer than Ancestry.com.

The word on the street is that the 1940 Census is being indexed as we speak. I haven't seen anything official but that is what the genealogy community is suggesting. I hope they're right. https://familysearch.org/1940Census