The National Archives this week released the first ever online census from 1940, resulting in over 37 million hits the first day, crashing the site. John Seabrook celebrates the records as "the bread and butter of genealogical research":
I searched through twenty-six census forms … filled with the pinched, Depression era handwriting of the enumerator, one Mortimer A. Gubbis, Jr., until I came upon the names of assorted ancestors: both of my paternal grandparents, two uncles, and numerous cousins, but not my father, who must have been living somewhere else at that point. (Another mystery to solve.) I found them among farmers (five million Americans counted themselves as farmers, compared to 613,000 in 2010) and laborers and stenographers and salesmen, in a nation of only a hundred and thirty-two million that was emerging from the Great Depression and heading into the Second World War. On seeing their names on the list, I had the familiar feeling: the vastness of world history seemed to abruptly contract in scale and fit neatly into the tiny squares and rectangles of the census form.
Justin Wolfers tracked down the history of his house:
It was home to three African-American families (or, in the words of the 1940 census, “Negroes”). Multiple families in a dwelling was actually pretty common in Philadelphia, with each floor of the brownstone occupied by separate families. The three families provide an interesting snapshot of Depression-era Philadelphia.
First, the Chisom’s, who had moved to Philadelphia from Blackville, South Carolina. Neither Robert Chisom (age 47) nor his wife Ina (age 38) had any formal education. He was working as a laborer for the city, and earned $800 (which is equivalent to $13,000, today). She was a housewife. Their son Leroy (age 17) had attended school until the fourth grade, and was looking for his first job. But in the wake of the Great Depression, he had been unemployed for over two years.
Tips on how to find out about your home and history here. There's also a great Life photo essay from the 1940s on what those census takers might have looked like.
The Dish 