Saturday, April 7, 2012

Saturday Night Fun 1940 Census Claude Hansen


It's Saturday Night, let's have some Genealogy Fun!


Remember those Easter egg hunts you had when you were a kid? Or you hosted when you were a parent or grandparent of small children (or even big children...)? Remember the happiness and joy you had finding the eggs hidden in the garden or the field? And the goodies sometimes found inside them? I'm really looking forward to the Easter egg hunt in our front yard for Lolo and Audrey on Sunday morning.


I have a Genealogy Easter Egg Hunt for you! Here's the directions:


1. Pick a target family that you want to find in the 1940 U.S. Census.

2. Determine their street address if you can using the available information (see How Can I Find Out Where My Folks Lived in 1940? for ideas).

3. When you find an address, go to Google Maps or the NARA Enumeration District maps website (http://www.archives.gov/research/search/), or on ancestry.com (http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=3028) to find the specific block that your target family resided. Note the two cross streets and the back street for that block.

4. Go to the Steve Morse Unified 1940 Census ED Finder (http://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html) and enter your state, county, and street information in order to find the Enumeration district number for the target family.

5. Use the FREE MyHeritage.com 1940 census collection (http://www.myheritage.com/1940census) or the FREE Ancestry.com 1940 census collection (http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2442) to see the census images for your target state, county and Enumeration District.

6. Navigate page to page to find your target family. If you find the target family, show us! And save the page to your computer hard drive.


1. My dad has always been fun to find in the census, he was born in Minnesota in 1906, but his family moved to Montana in 1910, but they moved after the census so I found him in Minnesota an 1910, Montana in 1920, and so when the 1930 census came along I asked him where he was living in 1930. he said he was living in a lumber camp in North Idaho, so I thought I would look for his parents on a farm near Blanchard in Idaho and he was listed with his parents and younger brother Leigh. By 1940 my dad was living in Spokane, Washington and he said he was a lodger at Mrs. Cooks boarding house in Hillyard a neighborhood in the north east part of Spokane. Actually Hillyard was a separate town till 1925 when it was annexed to Spokane and it was named for James J. Hill who built the largest railroad yard west of Chicago here and they named the town Hill's Yard, later changed to Hillyard.

2. I looked in the city directory for a boarding house owned by a Cook, none listed, so I checked the list of Cooks in the directory (almost a whole page of surname Cook)and only one listed in Hillyard, Kate Cook at E. 2921 Queen Ave.

3. Since I still live in the neighborhood and on Queen Avenue but nearly a mile west of E. 2921 Queen Avenue I know the area well.

4. Steve Morse's locator showed the cross streets of Queen and Regal to be in both ED numbers 41-24 and 41-25, so looking at the descriptions of ED 24 and 25 I found that ED 24 went from Queen North and ED 25 went from Queen South. So since the odd numbers are on the north side of Avenues in this area I downloaded the descriptions of ED 41-24 and Block 142 Diamond Ave, Haven, Queen Ave, Regal contains this house. Note Kate Cook was the last person on the previous page of the census so does not show in this census, so I have that page and the one after this one also, found several names I recognize.



Well my dad was listed as a garage mechanic at a garage, actually he was working for Madren Brothers Studebaker garage then about a 4 block walk from Mrs. Cooks boarding house. My uncle Leigh was also there and he was listed as a truck driver at retail lumber, he was working at a lumber yard and did a lot of jobs from taking lumber off the saw rack to truck driving. The mill was a couple of miles south of Mrs. Cooks house and my uncle rode his bicycle to work each day which was downhill to work, but uphill at night. My mom lived about 9 blocks west and one block south, and they did not get married for about a year and a half after the 1940 census.

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