Friday, April 1, 2022

1950 Census Records

Wow! The U.S. Government just released its census records from 1950. By law, those records were kept confidential for 72 years. Now they're available and you can search them by name.

I found my mother's family, shown in the detail provided. The entry identifies my mom as a "step-daughter" (which was a family secret; I wasn't told her "father" wasn't her biological dad until my adulthood). The entry also lists my mother's two younger sisters but doesn't include her youngest brother because he wasn't born yet. My mom was 13 years old when this form was filled out.

You can search for your family here: link 



8 comments:

  1. It's awesome that you can see your family in those records and get a bit of family history! :)

    Hope you're having a good weekend :)

    Away From The Blue

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  2. Oooh, how intriguing to discover a big family secret when you were older? How did you feel about it when you found out?
    My husband's Dad revealed a big family secret to me about 2 years before he died (CBC and his mum were there also and later, both said, "I'd NEVER heard that before!!!") that his Mum had an affair with a German Prisoner of War- she worked at the PoW camp (we'd ended up going for a walk there where it used to be - that being the context of how it came up) and that was why his parents split up and how he ended up going to live with his uncle in Cumbria!

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    1. Wow, that's interesting. I was offended when I learned about my family's secret. I couldn't understand why they didn't trust me with it when I was younger.

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  3. As someone who has been tremendously fascinated in genealogy (and who has worked on their own family's extensively for decades now), this post made my eyes light up like fireworks.

    Here in Canada, most of the more personalized details (as opposed to broad statistics such as the population of a given town or city) of our censuses are not made available for ninety-two years. As such, unless I am somehow blessed to become a centenarian, I will likely never get the chance to see my own name in census print like this.

    I am truly all for privacy, but I do think that waiting very nearly one hundred years to open up this country's censuses to the general public is a bit of overkill on that front (IMO).

    And, actually, further to that point, as of the 2006 census, I believe it was, those who answer get to to choice if they want their information made public after 92 years or not. If they select not, then it will be sealed from public view (presumably) forever.

    Suffice it to say, that is not a box I check when census time rolls around. I do everything in my power to ensure that if future relatives want to learn about me/my family, they can do so as readily and easily as possible.

    I am deeply sorry that your family kept such an important point from you for so long. As someone whose own trees has more skeletons than a Halloween popup store and more secrets than the Pentagon, I can sincerely relate, at least in part, to not finding out about something that major until well after childhood.

    Autumn Zenith 🧡 Witchcrafted Life

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