"Tracing Our Roots" Newsletter Archive (A monthly genealogy newsletter written by the late Brenda Kellow, dec'd, for the Plano Star Courier newspaper. We've included all the ones we could recover.)
We don’t have long to wait! Only three more days! One is released each decade. This occurs on a regular basis when it is 72 years old. What is it?
The census. In just three days the National Archives will release the 2,667 rolls of the 1930 U.S. population schedules! This is such an important event that the Archives and branch archives will open at midnight for patrons to begin viewing it, but you may need to get a free ticket prior to Monday, April 1st. Check with your facility prior to your visit. Every branch and every library that has ordered the census from the archives should reach maximum capacity of patrons turning the cranks of too few microfilm readers. Check the site at www.nara.gov/genealogy/.
Harrington Library Genealogy Section should have the 1930 Texas U.S. census in about 6 weeks.
Lucky are those researching the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, parts of Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and part of West Virginia for they have a soundex, or surname index of residents in those states. The rest of us do not have that privilege. We will have to either look through the entire county for sparsely populated areas or use the finding aids prepared by the thoughtful archives staff for large cities.
Before jumping into your research, you must prepare by doing your homework. For highly populated areas, you will need to know the first and last names, the county in which they lived, and the address. (See: home.pacbell.net/spmorse/census/.) If you are lacking any of these clues, begin asking questions of living relatives, scour documents on hand, and write down the 1920 address, as they might not have moved. The considerate archives prepared Enumeration District Maps for the Fifteenth Census of the United States 1930 (M1930) on 8,345 sheets spanning 36 rolls of microfilm. This is not all you should know. For a complete list of clues to use the census, visit NARA’s URL at www.nara.gov/genealogy/1930census_city_streets.html.
1930 CENSUS FORMS: Ancestry.com has the 1930 blank census forms online for downloading for free. Go to www.ancestry.com/save/charts/census.htm and click on 1930 Extraction Form.
1930 Census to go online: MyFamily.com, Inc. will publish the digitized images of the 1930 Census online within hours after the release from the National Archives on April 1st. These images will be available to subscribers through Ancestry.com, which is a part of the MyFamily.com network of web sites. The company plans to work around the clock and seven days a week until all the images are available to the public. As I understand it, the completed images will be released each day until the expected completion date of three months. They plan the release of the completed indexes by the end of the year.
FBI RECOGNIZES LDS DATABASE AS MODEL FOR TRACKING TERRORISTS: Just before boarding the plane on Saturday, the headline with LDS and FBI caught my attention. Seems the Feds recognized their database prior to September 11 was not sophisticated enough to handle the vast amount of information necessary to find the terrorists. So, they asked the Church computer experts for their help in name recognition programs, and they got it. If you would like to read the article, find it on line at the Salt Lake City Tribune’s site at www.sltrib.com/2002/mar/03222002/nation_w/721638.htm.
ONLINE: The libraries with online catalog research capabilities is available through Library Services of Berkeley at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Libweb/.
ADOPTIONS: Need help with handling adoptions? There are free pages on the Internet related to adoption, etc., at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~fox2/bookmark.htm.
Brenda Kellow, dec'd, Certified Genealogist and Certified Genealogical Instructor, had a Bachelor’s Degree in history and taught genealogy courses at the local Community College and computer genealogy at the University.
