Continuing with newer features of the subscription genealogy site Ancestry.com, consider the 1940 U.S. federal census.

This census was released to the public 72 years after its compilation, in April 2012, and was quickly indexed by numerous online sites. Even though Ancestry.com is a paid site, its 1940 census can be accessed free from any computer with Internet capability.

Go to Ancestry.com and click on “Search.” On the drop-down menu, select “Census and Voter Lists.” Under “Narrow by Category,” select “U.S. Federal Census Collection.” (At this point, you could start searching all U.S. censuses by individuals’ names, but continue as described here to go specifically to the 1940 census.)

Scroll down the page, and select “1940 United States Federal Census FREE!”

Now you can fill out the form displayed on the left, with specifics—an ancestor’s name and other known information—and begin your search. I especially like the 1940 census because it’s the first one in which I (born in 1936) have my name recorded, and what’s more, I can search it throughout my old neighborhood and find the names of boyhood friends.

The 1940 census asked many of the same questions as those from 1910, 1920, and 1930: address; name, gender, and age; relationship to the head of the household; and country of birth. But it doesn’t have some information found on earlier censuses, like age at first marriage, date of immigration, or whether alien or naturalized.

It did add some questions, including “Where did you live in 1935?” and “Is there a radio in the household?”

As with all records, be wary of errors in the original spelling of the name, dates given, etc., as well as in the transcription of the record by the Ancestry.com indexer. Note that these latter errors, if they involve the names you are searching for, may prevent you from finding your relative’s names.

If that is the case, try various phonetic spellings of the name, use initials for given names, etc. Be creative—you’d be surprised how a name could by mangled by a marginally literate enumerator, taking information from an illiterate citizen, speaking a foreign language!

Sometimes no number of permutations of a name will have success. If that’s the case but you know the address where your relatives lived, one trick is to search for the name of a nearby neighbor (if you know them) of your family, possibly neighbors whose name was not misspelled by the enumerator or the indexer.

If you find the neighbors, inspection of nearby entries may yield the information recorded for your relatives. If you don’t know the neighbors’ names but know the address, or at least the neighborhood, there’s another approach: searching by enumeration districts.

Enumeration districts were subdivisions of localities, established so that a manageable area could be assigned to each census enumerator, or record-taker. Before the computer age, if you wanted to search a census, you would go to library for a (paper) map that outlined the enumeration districts (EDs) for the city or town you wanted.

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