Indexing the 1950 Census: How You Can Take Part

There’s a lot of buzz about it. The indexing of the recently released 1950 United States Federal Census. Those of us into genealogy are excited about having access to this historic information.

As you may know, the U.S. population census is taken every ten years. It started in 1790, and surely you participated in the most recent one done in 2020. So why was the 1950 census just released? By law, the specifics of the census cannot be released for 72 years from the official date of the census. Interestingly, the 1950 census was the last census to be enumerated by hand. Enumerators went door-to-door, interviewing residents to fill out the questionnaires. A workforce of over 140,000 men and women were trained for this task. As you can imagine, recording the answers by hand resulted in documents with various degrees of accuracy and readability.

All of the digitized images of the 1950 census, enumerating more than 150 million people, were released online at 12:01 AM EST on April 1, 2022 by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Within hours, the major genealogy sites had downloaded the images.

In anticipation of this release, software engineers at Ancestry.com developed software that enabled a computer to read the handwriting from the images and produce a transcription. An agreement had been negotiated between Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org. When the images had been transcribed by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) software, the results were turned over by Ancestry to Familysearch.org to perform a review by humans.

Just think about that for a moment. 150 million people, each of whom have several fields of hand-recorded information that need review, like age, gender, education level and occupation. What an undertaking, right?

Here’s where genealogy enthusiasts like us can take part. Familysearch has asked for volunteers to help in this project.

Each field of information needs to be reviewed by an indexer to determine if the AI software accurately transcribed what the enumerator had written in 1950. There are three categories of reviews conducted.

• First a Name Review is done, which only addresses the surname and given name of each person enumerated.

• The second category is a review of the information at the top of each page, called a Header Review. This addresses items such as state, county, date, enumerator’s name and enumeration district.

• The third category is the Household Review in which the names are reviewed a second time and all other fields are reviewed for the first time.

There is currently an open invitation for everyone to help in this project. To volunteer, go to familysearch.org/getinvolved/1950 . The more volunteer indexers involved, the sooner the entire census will be fully searchable by all. It's easy. It's fun. It's useful. Most of all, it's personally rewarding. I definitely encourage you to take part.

Have questions or comments? Feel free to post those below!