1940 Census Data Released, Manomet Data Downloaded

Starting today, you can access U.S. Census data from 1940 through the National Archives. One of our Twitter followers, @SBAnderson, reminded me of it this morning with this handy tweet. "1940 Manomet census data I downloaded this a.m. http://db.tt/yOU4dANv

The link's a good one, it will take you to a dropbox where you can download a zip file. The file includes 28 pages of scanned Census documents, that includes names and addresses of Manomet residents in 1940. It's pretty neat.

You can access more information on the National Archives website, 1940census.archives.gov. The site includes a database of Americans living within the existing 48 states and six territories on April 2, 1940. The database can be searched by enumeration district. The National Archives has joined a consortium of groups to create a name-based index.

Questions asked in the Census included value of home, marital status, education, citizenship, employment status, occupation, and income.

According to the Boston Globe:

With 3.9 million images scanned from more than 4,000 rolls of microfilm, the database represents the largest collection of digital information ever released by the Archives, and the first time a census has been released online. It consists of individual responses to the survey that have been kept private for seven decades.

“Many of us will be discovering relatives and older family members that we didn’t know we had, picking up threads of information that we thought were lost, and opening a window into the past that until now has been obscured,” David S. Ferriero, the nation’s archivist, said at a morning ceremony in which he performed the first search. “We now have access to a street-level view of a country in the grips of a depression and on the brink of global war.”