Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Friday, April 6, 2012

Where are all the images?

The 1940 U.S. was released about four full days ago, now moving into five. If you want to see images, where can you go to see them?

Of course, you can start out with the U.S. National Archives. The National Archives site is being "hosted" by Archives.com. Here is what the official statement has to say,
About this Site
1940 census is an official web site of the U.S. government, administered by the National Archives and Records Administration in partnership with Archives.com
Now who or what is Archives.com? It is a subscription website that claims to have more than 2 billion records. But who are they? Archives.com is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. It is apparently owned by Inflection LLC. (See Inflection.com). Inflection is described as "a data and e-commerce company headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley. The company owns and operates Archives.com and PeopleSmart.com, emerging leaders in the family history and people search markets."

Inflection.com lists a number of partners, they include:
Inflection.com apparently has two divisions, the one called Archives.com is directed at family history. The other division is called peoplesmart and is what I call a skip-trace company, one that has a database of records to find living individuals. 

OK, enough about Archives.com for now. They apparently negotiated a deal with the National Archives to host the official website and partnered with FamilySearch. Of course, they have the entire 1940 U.S. Census online at Archives.gov.

Just a side note. Archives.gov is the National Archives website. Archives.com is the host site for the 1940 U.S. Census, but is a private company. Neither of them is Archive.org (notice no "s") which has a complete copy of the U.S. Census minus the new 1940 version.

Next is FamilySearch.org. It is difficult to determine if FamilySearch.org has a complete copy of the 1940 U.S. Census only certain states are available to be searched. As of 6 April, 2012, most of the states were still showing that records were unavailable. It appears that FamilySearch is releasing records as they are indexed.

Ancestry.com announces that all of the 1940 U.S. Census images are available.  Although you can search the Census by county, populated place and enumeration district, only two states have been indexed by name.

MyHeritage.com has the entire 1940 U.S. Census images available for free.

So at the time of the writing of this post, 6 April 2012, it looks like to me the complete U.S. Census is on only two websites. Anyone know if this is correct? Any other sites?


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