Like many researchers, I was quite excited when the 1940 Federal US Census was released. After all, we only had one known family who would have been recorded in the Census and that was my husband's Great Grandmother, her second husband and their son. I had successfully managed to build a profile of their life from 1905 when Annie arrived in the US up until the late 1940s, so locating the family in the Census was going to be easy, right?Wrong! It has been anything but!
Annie & Harry Hindle, both born in Yorkshire migrated in 1905. At that time Annie was married to Charles Worship, and her divorce didn't become final until 1921 and she married Harry in 1922. I have written fairly extensively over the last couple of years about Annie and Harry Hindle and you can read an earlier post HERE.
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| Annie Hindle, Nee Rhodes and Formerly Worship Taken circa 1921 Passport |
The address in question was 14 North Belfield Ave, Havertown Pennsylvania. The Census locator on The National Archives site uses the streets that intersect as a research guide. This is quite useful, if you know the area, so a search of a map was made. Just as I was about to head to Google Maps, I simply put the address into Google on the off chance it revealed any data. I was surprised to see this page which is really aimed at those buying and selling property, but does give some information. The year the house built is wrong, because we have the passenger lists for 1946, but the site is very useful. There are current review of the area, a detailed description of the house and a close up map with the property pin pointed.
Despite all the hours searching, I still can not find the family in the 1940 Census. There are several possibilities as to why -
- My lack of familiarity with US Counties within the States
- My lack of understanding the framing & recording of the Census route
- The family were in the UK at the point of the Census
A disappointing state of events, but it does confirm the worth of indexes that are being created by those reading and researching with the Census. I wrote about this HERE.
The Carnival of Genealogy is hosted by Jasia at CreativeGene
The Carnival of Genealogy is hosted by Jasia at CreativeGene
What a shame that you can't find them. It does seem that the 1940 census has proven to be a challenge -until the indexing is complete. I confess to being quite pleased that I have no one to chase as it's left me free to do other things, and blip over a lot of 1940 posts from the US thereby catching up on my Google Reader lists.
ReplyDeleteI've been finding my folks in the big city of Philadelphia, so I figured - how hard could it be to find someone in Havertown? Um, hard. I think it has to do with the town names. Even though it's been around for ages, it's "unincorporated" and is likely called something else. It is in Haverford Township in Delaware County. Based on the actual maps, I was convinced that the street is in 23-94. But I didn't see it. Unless the street name changed since then. I did not look at every name in that ED, only the street names. Maybe I will try to get back to it later for you...
ReplyDeleteI've enjoyed the challenge of finding my folks in the 1940 census, unless they live out in a rural area. It's been very,very difficult to find anybody who was living out of the city. I'm not sure if it's because they all moved since 1930 or there is something off with the descriptions in the finder. I hope you find your Hindles when the census is all indexed. It will be before you know it.
ReplyDeleteI hope Pennsylvania will be indexed and online soon. Surely you'll find them then! Don't you love the challenges?!
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