As I mentioned a few days ago, the 1950 census is now online. You can search it here. Here is my father in 1950:
As usual, click the image to embiggen. For some reason, no employment is listed for my grandfather, even though he was busily engaged as VP of sales at the Smith & Drum Advertising Agency. My father is listed as a "personal man" for the Naval Reserve Armory, which is an odd way of saying that he was—or soon would be—working in the Naval Recruiting Office during the Korean War.
Here is my mother in 1950:
My grandfather is listed as "Electric/Telegraph," which is accurate. He was an electrician for Western Union. My mother's name is spelled Jean, not Jeanne, but otherwise everything is correct.
The census has been made searchable by running the census forms through a machine-learning handwriting recognition engine, and the results are pretty iffy. My search for Drum turned up Drumm, Crum, Dram, Drim, etc., though eventually it produced Harry Drum. My search for Holligers was completely unsuccessful. I only found the record because I knew where they lived and was able to locate their enumeration district, which narrowed the search to a dozen pages.
Still, I can't complain. Handwriting recognition on random, cramped styles is just not very good. Eventually this will all be transcribed by humans and the results will be much better.
"Personnel man" might be what they were trying to write.
It appears to me that the handwriting recognition is much less of an issue than the poor query tools.
Wait; computers can't even read the handwriting that an eight-year old can? I fear that AI might not be as advanced as Kevin thinks it is.
Yeah. They really need to score the matches, sort by score, group by location, and allow searching for multiple names in the family.
Oddly none of the relatives I tried to search for turned up even though I'm certain of where they were living in 1950.
Same issue for me. I searched for my mother's maiden name in Tampa where her parents definitely lived at that time. A matching last name did come up but it was in New Jersey, though there were some FL names on the same page. I think the machines have a bit more learning to do.
same here. i think it picked up an uncle of mine who lived in the same town as my grandparents, but i saw hide nor hair of my grandparents, who were the subject of the search.
Found my grandfather in his home town, listed along with his second wife, though I'm sure he was in South America during this period.
Handwriting recognition on random, cramped styles is just not very good.
On the other hand, one thing I've discovered in searching old census records is that the handwriting in those days was remarkable. Not only legible (to the human eye, at least), but beautiful cursive, which is increasingly becoming a relic of the past.
Actually, a name search that returns a bunch of alternate spellings is a feature, not a bug, in genealogy. For the most part old records are overrun with spelling errors, so being able to search though a bunch of "in the ballpark" records the old fashioned way can help you break through a wall.
Can't find Great Great Great Grandfather Drum's name on the ship manifest? Maybe the drunk dock worker wrote "Crumb".
Yes! And for folks with more hard to spell surnames the possibility of a typo increases - like is it ie or ei? one n or two? and so on.
It's not just difficulty of handwriting recognition; a lot of entries were written in script -- ornate but messy handwriting that the software cannot recognize.
Did you help to correct the errors and add transcription fixes?
I found my moms family easy. Smaller city, short distinctive last name. Didn't have the patience to find my dads. Bigger city, more common name. Maybe later...
Cool!
Back in the 1950s, there were at least two pages in the Manhattan phone book alone with my parent's last name, and fifty or a hundred with the right first name or initials for my father. Of course, they could have been living in Queens or the Bronx back then, so who knows. It would help if I could search by age or if the web site were easier to use.
I tried finding my grandparents in the Ellis Island registry. They all immigrated via NYC. I may have found my paternal grandfather, but it's just a guess. There's no sign of the others, so we're guessing they were smuggled in by aquatic coyotes or that submarine thing in the Captain America movie.
I'm used to old records butchering my grandfather's name. He was Belgian, with a last name that starts with De. In California that just didn't compute, and they'd usually change the spelling to make it seem Spanish.
I didn't expect the AI to mess up my mother's name quite so much. Apparently the AI likes to turn Suzanne into Suganne, but my mom got Sigannah.
You can maybe improve your chances by first going to the Enumeration Maps,explained here:
https://1950census.archives.gov/howto/ed-maps.html
and getting the enumeration map ID from the map of your locality. You will need a free account to search them.
Go to:
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/821491
At the top right, register for an account then login. When you login, it will seem like it didn't like it, but if you look at the top you'll see your userid called out
In the advanced search bar at the top, put in the name of your locality, city and state. Hopefully that will yield one or a small number of maps. (if you don't narrow it this way, you will be looking at some 30,000 maps, good luck). Find the district number for where you want to search for a household. There will be a small area outlined and numerated in orange or yellow of the map. This is the second number, you also need the first. For Louisville, KY, that was 122, and my house was in 122-28.
Then search with a name and the enumeration map ID at
https://1950census.archives.gov/search/