Thursday, June 21, 2012

1940 Census Index for Indiana is Done



I've been anxiously awaiting the time that I can actually use an index to find my family in the 1940 census. I did look for them before and found a few of my families in the places I knew they would be. Now I can look for those others that liked to move around a bit at least in Indiana. I heard that Family Search has now released their index at: https://familysearch.org/

So I set to looking through my PAF for those family I wanted to look for. That was taking too long. I know I should have been preparing my list a long time ago. There has been family I've been wanting to find in the 1940 census soon after I found them all in the 1930 census ten years ago. Well, I went about to set up an Advanced Focus Filter in my PAF and put in the dates I wanted to look for, 1940+, and it gave me a list of Surnames. At least now I have something to start with. I've been trying not to get too excited, the waiting has been killing me.

My first find was my dad and his family. I've put a copy of the image above. His father, George Allen Dunn, and mother, Golda Edith(Roberts)Dunn were living in Brown County. This I suspected although they had been known to have lived in Johnson and Hamilton counties before. In Brown County, Indiana living in Hamblen township, Enumeration Dist. 7-1 on page 8B my dad's family is the 187th Household.
George and Golda Dunn and children are: Vonda, Jean, Doris, David, Ruth, Mahlon, Frances, Marcus, and Joel. My Aunt Doris made it on the Supplemental Question line 55, but I found no new information there that I didn't already know.

I did find out something new that I didn't know - the area they lived in at that time. Dad has told me some of the places they lived, but this one was new. So I did find something new to add to my family history. My dad's family were pretty poor and his father moved around quite a bit to get work wherever he could find it. He worked for farmers, gas stations, as a school janitor, and was a truck farmer himself. This was fun finding my first family in the 1940 census. Now I just have to wait for the rest of the states to be indexed so I can look for those families that moved out West.

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