With the 1940 United States Census freshly indexed and available online, you may be wondering how you can use Census data to make progress in your family history research. Of course you can look for the names of some of your family members in the 1940 Census (as well as prior Census records). Don’t stop there, though. Some of the questions might give you information that you can use to find even more facts for your family tree in other places.
The questions that are asked on each Census vary slightly, so some of these hints may not be applicable to all Census records. One interesting pair of questions is the age at first marriage/number of years in current marriage question. By doing a little math, you can figure out what to look for as far as marriage records. You can also figure out whether there were additional marriages which you may or may not have known about. If you find one, you can then go and look for the relative with another spouse in an earlier Census, and/or start looking for a marriage record.
Another question which can lead to interesting family history discoveries is the question of mother of how many children born/how many children now living. In the past, it was much more common for children to die young than it is now, and many a group of brothers and sisters remembers that there were one or more others who died very young. If there are more children listed as living than are listed in the household on the Census record, they may have married so look for them elsewhere in the Census. They also may have been living with other relatives or, in an unfortunate turn of events, may have been institutionalized or even worse disowned.
These are not the only Census questions that can lead you down new paths of discovery. For every Census record that you find, look carefully at the questions and the answers. You may find clues that could help you find previously undiscovered relatives or break through a brick wall that has been holding you back.
photo by cohdra on morguefile.com.