Rummaging Around in the 1940 Census

Yesterday the National Archives released the 1940 census to the public.  Seventy-two years is the proscribed time between an actual census and releasing the data.   So many people went online that the servers at the National Archives crashed.

Today I decided to take a stab at finding the census data on my grandparents, who lived in Oakland in 1940.  You can't look up a person by name (volunteers are in the process of alphabetizing the names), so you need to give a geographical area.  If you know a street and a cross-street, you're set.  I knew my grandparents lived on Holly Street, because I went to the house regularly as a child and helped my dad and his sister sell it in 1995.  And I was able to track down the house number from this picture:

My grandfather, my dad, and me, c. 1952. The house number is visible.

In 1940, the door-to-door census-takers were called "enumerators," and the areas they covered were "Enumeration Districts."  Based on the address,  I figured out the Enumeration District (61-271) and then had to check page after page of digitized images of the census for that district   Finally, there they were:  My grandparents and my dad as they were on April 15, 1940.  I didn't learn anything new except that my grandfather, a streetcar conductor, earned $1,684 annually, well above the 1940 median of about $950.

I was still in detective mode, so I decided to look up census data on the house where I've lived in Berkeley since 1984.  Brand-new people sprang to life, the people who built the house in 1924, who hung the ancient wallpaper we've had stripped off,  who used the old cooler space I can see remnants of behind kitchen drawers.  More on them tomorrow.