News
Rosemary Collins reports on data releases and genealogy news
1950 US census goes online with free access
The 1950 census of the USA, holding records of approximately 150 million people, was released online for free on 1 April.
Unlike the UK, where privacy laws mean that census records cannot be published for 100 years, the US census is released after 72 years by the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). It is available at 1950census.archives.gov.
The records include images of the original census schedules, and can be searched by name and filtered down by state, town, enumeration district or Native American reservation.
However, they can’t be searched by birthdate, which makes it more di cult to filter the results. For example, since the records do not redact the names of living individuals, WDYTYA? Magazine searched for US president Joe Biden.
Searching for ‘Joseph Biden’ brought up 400 pages of results. However, as we know that the president was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, we entered those details into the search engine under ‘State’ and ‘County/City’, and found the correct record as the first result.
The census results show Joseph Biden, age seven, living at the house of his maternal grandfather AJ Finnegan.
The US census records include details of each person’s relationship to the head of household; their race, sex, age and marital status; and details of their profession.
Following criticism of the transcriptions in the recently released 1921 census of England and Wales, it’s notable that each US census record lists the “Machine Learning (AI) Extracted Names”, which also contain errors.
For example, “Finnegan, AJ” is transcribed as “tanagan AJ” and “Biden, Frank”, who is listed as a lodger, is transcribed as “Biden Drank”.
The NARA is asking members of the public to double-check the computer-generated transcriptions by clicking a ‘Help Us Transcribe Names’ button at the top of the page.
The US census records are now available to view for free on family history websites Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk) and MyHeritage (myheritage.com). The records are not indexed, but researchers can browse them by location. Both websites are currently at work on creating their own transcriptions of the records. Ancestry’s is being done using artificial intelligence (AI) technology in partnership with volunteers from FamilySearch (familysearch.org). The records can also be browsed at the latter website.
The 1950 US census is one of several highprofile record releases in 2022. In addition to the 1921 census of England and Wales, the 1921 census for Scotland is due to be released later this year, while Beyond 2022, the digital reconstruction of documents lost when the Public Record O ce of Ireland was destroyed in 1922, will launch on 30 June.