The 1940 census was released today, 72 years after it was taken. Many different websites now have the images from the census available for review, but none come with an index. An index is not part of the release, nor is it part of the work conducted by the Natinal Archives in releasing the digitized images of the census. The process of creating an index falls to those individuals willing to volunteer a bit of time to help in the process. Interested in adding your mark to history?
If you want to participate, head on over to FamilySearch.org and join the community of volunteers working to make a full census index available to everyone for free. Just visit FamilySearch.org and click the “start now” button on the right side of the page. You can also learn more about the census from this page.
I’ve started indexing. Took a little bit of time to figure out what family search wants in the little boxes, but now I can go through a page quickly. So far the images are pretty good but writing is still an issue. It’s fun and the more volunteers the faster the indexing gets done. Try it.