Friday, April 06, 2012

1940 USA census now available on MyHeritage!

The following is from MyHeritage.

As you may have heard, the official USA census for 1940 was released this week, after 72 years of privacy protection. The census covered all 132 million people who lived in the USA in April 1940, and it is the largest and most comprehensive set of American historical records ever released. For each person the census includes the name, age, address, birthplace, members of the household, and a wealth of additional information on some people such as income, house value, number of former marriages and residence in 1935. If your family has any people who lived in 1940 in the USA, you will be able to find them here and learn more about them, and perhaps discover family members you did not previously know about.

We're proud to announce that MyHeritage is providing the entire 1940 USA census free of charge, right now, with all the original images.

Search the 1940 US census now

When the census was first released on Monday, April 2 2012, "1940 census" became the most popular search term on Google for 24 hours, and a frenzy of media publicity erupted, causing the official government website of the census to collapse under the load. It is now back up but slow to use. All the while, MyHeritage and a handful of other companies rushed to provide the census images to the public as soon as possible.

MyHeritage is the first company to post all images of the USA census online (in less than 48 hours), and the first to provide an initial index to search the census by name. We have all the images, but our name index is still very small and covers only parts of Rhode Island, so the best approach is to search by town or address and go through the census images, until you find the people you're looking for. In the next few months we'll be growing the index every day until it will cover the entire census and all people within it will be searchable by name.

Search the 1940 US census now

We'll soon enable our new automatic Record Matching technology, and users with family trees on MyHeritage will enjoy automatic notifications whenever we find their relatives in the 1940 US census (as we continue growing its database) or in any of the many data collections that we are now adding. You can search our entire database right now.

More details on the powerful new search engine that we've just added to MyHeritage that is making all this possible, called SuperSearch, and our exciting expansion into historical records that will provide great value to our users, will be provided soon.

Enjoy, and have a relaxing holiday,
MyHeritage team

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