A census taker interviews a large family in a suburb of Chicago during a visit to their home April 3, 1940. The 1940 census records were released April 2. (Keystone-France, Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
The 1940 census is the virtual equivalent of walking around your block and glancing in a neighbor's windows.
You won't get a sense of their decorating taste, but it is a window into the world of life back then in those homes and your own, sort of like finding an aged newspaper behind a wall.
The digital release of 1940 census data this month was eagerly greeted by sociologists and demographers because it contains so much more information about people than the 1930 census. It's available because the mandatory 72-year waiting period before census data can be released has ended.
The census includes more than 3.8 million pages of handwritten answers taken for as many as 50 questions asked by census takers who went door to door in early April 1940. In addition to querying people about their age, education level and birthplace, residents were asked where they lived in 1935, their jobs and salaries. Two residents on every page, or 5 percent of respondents, also were asked what language was spoken in their homes as children and, if they were married women, whether they were married previously and how old they were at the time of their first marriage.
The year 1940 was one of great change. The nation was trying to lift itself out of the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs were putting people back to work and the country was closely watching the war in Europe.
"This opens up an enormous opportunity for learning about neighborhoods," said Matthew Hall, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "We can start to get better estimates of the extent of suburbanization and segregation. People are curious about their roots, and this can provide a good learning opportunity and fulfill some curiosity."
It's pretty easy for anyone who clicks through the data to get a feeling about the makeup of their neighborhood 72 years ago, if it existed then.
Some homes had lodgers, others were filled with large, blended families, and the type of jobs that people held included stenographers, bookkeepers, gas station attendants, railway mail clerks, milliners and, a few blocks from my home, a cattle salesman at the Stockyards.
"You can get a sense of how big the families are, what the jobs were of the residents, who was retired. You get a sense of where people are from and the migration patterns," said Peter Alter, an archivist at the Chicago History Museum. "When I look at census records, I always get a tiny little historian's rush of adrenaline. It's just fascinating."
There's also the change in rents and home values to consider.
Homeowners who bemoan the loss of home equity during the past five years need only look at the value of their homes in 1940 to feel a sense of home appreciation, if only for a moment.
Digging up all that information sounds daunting, but navigating the site, 1940census.archives.gov, is at times easier than trying to decipher a census taker's handwriting. Click through the various screens to input a location and determine the "enumeration districts," the geographic boundaries that were split up between census workers. The 1940 census currently isn't searchable by name.
From there it's a matter of scrolling through all the microfilmed digital pages in a district to find a particular address. But take note, because the homes aren't necessarily listed in order on a block or even a street.
While digging through the records of my Oak Park neighborhood, I was pretty sure I had found my house and thought that two families lived there. Twenty pages later, however, I realized that my house number on a different street was listed next to a neighbor's home on my street. As a result, it turns out there weren't two families living in my house, but, instead, it was a husband and wife and their two adult sons who both finished high school. One son was a salesman, and the other was a private secretary.
Was that family still living in 1950 in what is now my family's home? Was the same family still living in yours? We'll have to wait another 10 years to find out, when the 1950 census is released in 2022.