1950 Census
I've found many problems with the 1950 census (not the least of which is having no citations available in Family Search). Today I encountered someone who had a record in Ancestry but no record in Family Search. I tried looking for others on that census page, and didn't find them either. Is there a centralized location for reporting these problems? Here is the record I found: Michaela Slade, living in Contra Costa, California. https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/264088938:62308
I have found many errors while searching in my home town, including the misindexed name of my own parents, which I corrected in Family Search (but can't correct in Ancestry). I thought the promise of indexing was that we'd get to do the communities we know well. I'm planning to start a personal project for my own county to make sure it's correct. There are so many errors which wouldn't be there if we'd actually been able to correct the areas we know well. It's depressing.
Answers
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I also have many issues with the 1950 census, including names that were skipped (not indexed), out of order (and not just by a line or two) or horribly misspelled, and scrambled family groups, including incorrect surnames. I would like to know if there is a way to fix these errors when they are found. I helped correct family groups in the census, and can understand the problems after trying to fix the computer read documents, a process which was, in my opinion, a disaster.
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Today I went to look at the first sheet of my hometown, and they completely left out the first family of four on the sheet. I'd love to be able to fix that problem too, but currently there isn't a way we can do that, is there? And then there's the case where they made up an additional family member for my cousins' family which was a mangled version of "no one home" which someone okayed. So I agree with your comment 100% JanetKarkow. I wish there was a process to start over. And if there is, could someone please let us know. When we did the 1940 census, we still ended up with errors, but far fewer because we used the standard indexing process with checks and balances built in.
The 1950 census process is just depressing. There's a family I'm researching, and I found out that the stepchildren were living in the house in 1950, so presumably the parents were in a nursing home. My town didn't have a nursing home then, so they were either 30 or 60 or maybe even 180 miles away. Possibly they were even on vacation. I can't find them anywhere. It might be a case of them actually being skipped, or a case of an entire page being skipped, or just really bad indexing by the computer that someone didn't fix right. With luck, I'll run across them sometime, although I have little hope.
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@Judy Crook_1 We are aware of the lack of citations and other issues with the 1950 US Census currently on FamilySearch. We are told that work is being done on it. We do not have a projection for when to expect things to improve. Meanwhile, feel free to find the 1950 Census information on other websites. You can even use the URL from another website as a source on a Family Tree person, if you'd like. Here's a help center article that gives the steps for creating a source:
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Thanks for your reply. I'm glad you're aware of the problems. What I want is someone to give me the ability to fix my county and state. I also know that things come and go--for example, citations for other census records, even beyond 1940, are now suddenly missing from Family Search, which is depressing. I know this because I work with a lot of profiles of people I'm not related to. I also know how to create citations, although I'm not sure why Ancestry won't let you just steal theirs since it was theoretically a joint project, and they actually have a few decent ones that don't include the word Ancestry as part of the citation.
But it hurts every day to know that we were NOT ALLOWED to do a good job on the census transcription project, and that people are thus lost in the bowels of the census. And yes, I do use the actual archives.gov site. But you have a gazillion and one motivated volunteers here who really want to make it right, and thus far we have no ability to do so. If I were in charge, I'd make a detailed plan of how to make things right and implement it as soon as possible. Shortcuts do not work.
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