LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) Seventy-two years ago, workers went house to house and filled in ledgers by hand when compiling 1940 census data.
A few months ago the information became available for volunteers across the country to put into a searchable online format.
Kentucky anticipates getting its searchable census information completed in another month or so, the Lexington Herald-Leader (http://bit.ly/KVMZxi) reports. Thirteen organizations across the state are helping to input the data
All the 1940 information is in databases photographed in its original form. It includes different handwriting styles in a pre-Internet era when no matter how standardized the questions seemed, many different interpretations were possible.
It has to be logged into a computer database and checked for accuracy to make it easy for the searches it will draw.
One Knott County teacher discovered her grandmother's records while typing in data, said Louise Jones, director of special collections and library for the Kentucky Historical Society.
The information shows changes in the way people live. Jones discovered that her two-bedroom, one-bath Frankfort home housed seven people back then.
Jones said the 1940 census is important because it was effectively a census of both 1935 and 1940 and reflected the federal government's desire to know how the population had dispersed and reordered itself during the Great Depression.
Also, it's a valuable tool for the millions of Americans interested in genealogy and family research.
Phyllis Spiker, the geneaology and family history leader for the Central Kentucky Computer Society in Lexington, said census data will be available and free on the major genealogy Web sites.
Census data was never intended for genealogy research, she said. Only more recently have people begun to realize that such data is of interest to citizens as well as government officials and trend-spotters. Savvy researchers can use records such as Civil War rosters and railroad pension information to track their ancestors, she said.
Information from: Lexington Herald-Leader, http://www.kentucky.com