1950 Census Release Day! (aka a genealogist's decennial holiday)

It's finally here! April 1, 2022 - Release day for the 1950 U.S. Census by the National Archives. Lots of us who do genealogy and family history are pretty excited, myself included.

One of the reasons I've been looking forward to this census is because my grandma, (Arlene) Dolores Vrana, was missing on the 1940 census. Her whole family is listed, right where they should be, and even though she would have been 5 years old, she wasn't recorded.

So today, I used the NARA website: https://1950census.archives.gov/ to try to find her. I thought she lived in Carmichaels, Greene County, Pennsylvania. Carmichaels is a pretty small town, and the enumeration district maps for 1950 showed that the whole town was included in one district. I went straight to that file, and paged through every sheet. And...no Vranas.

I was pretty disappointed, but NARA has a rudimentary index available, which was created with computer technology.  Other sites (Ancestry/FamilySearch) are partnering to use AI technology to fully index the new census, but it will take some time before those are available.

I ran a search for the surname "Vrana" within the Greene County, PA census districts, and voila! There she was, age 15, with her parents and two siblings.

1950 Census of Population and Housing, U.S. Census Bureau. Available from the National Archives and Records Administration at: https://1950census.archives.gov/. Accessed April 1, 2022.

There isn't a lot of new information for me to gain from this record, but there is something special about seeing my grandma there, after finding her missing from the previous decade's census.

I hope to find other relatives in the 1950 Census in the coming days and weeks.

Happy Searching to All!