Have you delved yet into the United States 1950 Census? It was released just over two months ago. For those who anxiously awaited the 1940 census back in 2012, it was generally a madhouse of companies and volunteers helping to index every last page. Thanks to the help of thousands of volunteers, the project only took about FOUR months to complete. That’s pretty amazing!

Technology has made many advances since 2012, including creating OCR scanning that can be used by COMPUTERS to create an index to the 1950 census.

Now, if you’ve had any experience reading text that used OCR scanning – like historical newspapers – you might have found it a bit difficult to read the pages.

While computers have done a relatively good job indexing the census, it will be a frustrating experience if YOUR family happens to be one of the wrongly read and misindexed surnames, especially if they lived in a city of any size.

Did you know that FamilySearch is partnering with Ancestry to share updates and corrections to the census index?

Although the computer indexing is finished, volunteers are still needed to manually review and make corrections to the index before it is posted online at FamilySearch.

My mother always used to repeat that old adage “Many hands make light work” and it certainly applies to volunteering as much or as little time as you are able.

The more hands (and eyes) that are reviewing family names, ages, places, etc., the faster the project will be done and the more accurate the census index will be.

Want to learn more about making an important contribution to the genealogy world?

FamilySearch is presenting a free webinar tomorrow, 10 June 2022, which can be viewed by anyone anywhere in the world, at 4:00 p.m. Mountain Time.

To learn more about the project or to ask specific questions, just click on the link above.

See you there!