On April 1st, the US Census bureau will release the scans of the American 1950 federal census. (The 72 year privacy gag law period expires.)
That population form has 5 variants for the contiguous USA and was distributed randomly.
The variation was minor: the person every 5th row was asked additional questions, but whether the offset started on row 1 through 4 could differ. (The rows had a box surrounding it and the row number circled.) For instance, the following form is marked in it’s upper left corner as the “(S4)” variant… where deeper samples start at row 4:
Is there a way the Gramps form feature can handle 5 variants of the same form?
It doesn’t look like this would be any different than the 1940 census which had supplementary questions for two persons on each sheet.
The way that is handled is that the form definition includes all of the extra columns and they are only filled in for the rows that include them.
Allen Crider
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Ancestry has all of the 1950 census image files loaded. None of them have been indexed yet so you have to know where a family lived and then scan image by image to find them.
Found both my parents’ families. Thankfully they lived in a small town.
The NARA archive has machine indexed page available.
Here’s a fuzzy search form URL preset to my home county of Lawrence county, Pennsylvania. (So you can sub in your county & state.)
https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Lawrence&page=1&size=100&state=PA
You can narrow it further by names & Enumeration District numbers.
Are you working on adding the 1950 Census to the Forms add-on (docs say it is available, but it is not)? I created a custom.xml to do this for now but I am afraid of using it if the addon will be updated soon.
Like the 1940 Census, you could add all of the sample line questions to the same section as the other questions. It would be up to the user to fill them in if the row is one of the selected sample rows.
I’ve opted to not use the Forms add-on. So it won’t be me creating the 1950 form.
My question was posted because release was scheduled for Apr 1, 2022 & I hoped to update the wiki beforehand. But then discovered the pages needed more expected.
A 1950 US Census form PR (534) was submitted last week. It has not been reviewed/approved yet. If you want to try the draft commit, it is at Add 1950 Census · gramps-project/addons-source@e9e848e · GitHub .
Caveat: Once you start entering people with one version of the 1950 census, any field changes other than labelling will break those entries. So be sure that the order of the fields are what you want before entering any Events.
Personally, I tweaked it to make the field labels more consistent with the 1940 census. I did not change the field order.
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