The data from the 1940 United States Census was released on April 2, 2012. It is the most exciting, most anticipated, resource that genealogists are going to be able to dig into this year. Here are some interesting statistics about the 1940 U.S. Census. The release of the 1940 census was so popular that thousands of genealogists flocked to The National Archives website to check it out. This caused a virtual traffic jam that resulted in the website being temporarily shut down. It was getting more hits than the server could process. Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for The National Archives, … Continue reading →

Google has made the announcement that it will soon stop updating its newspaper archiving project. This decision could, perhaps, be so that Google can work on other, newer, projects instead. What does this change mean for genealogists, who rely on newspaper archives for their research? Newspapers, especially older newspapers, are an excellent resource for genealogists. One of the main reasons why a genealogist would choose to hunt down a copy of a newspaper from decades ago would be to read the obituaries. You can learn quite a bit about an ancestor simply by reading over his or her obituary. Obviously, … Continue reading →