1950 CENSUS! BABY BOOMERS and SPECIAL INFANT BABY COUNT!

BABY BOOMERS! 

ANYONE BORN BETWEEN 1946 and 1964 is considered to be a BABY BOOMER!  

Since the enumerators were out there collecting information that would present a statistical body of information, a snapshot of the United States on April 1, 1950, what about all those babies born between January 1, 1950, and March 31, 1950?

IMPORTANT UPDATE: On APRIL 2nd, I WENT INTO THE NARA SITE AGAIN and LEARNED THAT THE INFANT CARDS HAD BEEN THROWN AWAY AT SOME TIME BACK IN THE DAY and so we will not be able to find them anywhere on the NARA site. I apologize for my misleading you with the original post as below.  However, I spent an hour on the site myself and then went back to the earliest mention of these cards and printed out the explanatory essay about the cards from the site thinking I just needed a break. Later, relaxing, I read the print out. That the cards WOULD NOT BE PART OF THE RELEASE OF THE 1950 CENSUS was on page 4 of 5 about them and blended into a paragraph.  That should have been the first thing NARA mentioned about the cards on the top of page 1. They are of course, part of the history of the census, and were used all those years ago for a statistical analysis, which can be interesting for other reasons.

The explaination for why they were thrown out is given this way:  The census bureau was checking these cards against REGISTERED BIRTHS IN EACH STATE.  As such they were looking to find out how many babies in a three month sample were born and not registered for birth in the first place.  Apparently, there was a good chance that a baby born in the 1950's despite the emphasis on VITAL RECORD KEEPING, was never registered by its parents. Therefore, if you know or suspect or wonder if your ancestor may have had a baby in 1950, the first thing you might do is check to see if the birth was registered; the baby still might have been born, been unregistered, and then died before April 1, 1950. Also there is a remark that some babies born in 1949 (my guess is December 1949) were also missed.

So those of us who have experienced difficulties in our research because we could not find any evidence of a birth via vital records or church baptismal records further back in history, perhaps because a certain county or state did not require it, must be a bit surprised by this.  There are many people alive who had to apply for a birth certificate later in life; These are titled as "Delayed" in county archives.

 
According to the NARA essay, some babies (called live births) were missed in 1950 because the baby had been born but died, or because the baby was born in a rural area, or because the baby moved with its family.

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A SPECIAL INFANT CARD WAS FILLED OUT!

And this isn't all. There were actually three forms to potentially be filled out. The government wanted to know how many live births the woman had*** From the questions, we can tell that the United States government wanted to know how that child was being supported. The UNITED STATES CENSUS BUREAU web site, previously linked to, has this PDF file with all three and the instructions. UNITED STATES CENSUS BUREAU SPECIAL BABY COUNT 1950

Full information about the parents including the mother's maiden name, the name of the hospital where the child was born, and the child's father's occupation, including what industry he worked in Sexism alert! The education of the mother was asked but NOT HER EMPLOYMENT.  

WHAT ABOUT A WOMAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO A CHILD THAT SHE GAVE UP FOR ADOPTION? (My question, not theirs!)

****Let's just say that it's my guess that most women who did so, perhaps before they were married to the person they were married to in 1950, would not put that child down on this form.  It's my guess that a typical American at the time was both far more trusting of the government than people today are and would be more cooperative but also have a far greater sense of their right to personal and medical privacy. Further adoptions were Closed if they were legal.

I can't wait to find a child that was stolen from a family!  (UPDATE: This census will not help.)

UPDATE March 25, 2022 : The question was only be asked of women who are married or who have been married and are separated or divorced....

Click on the tab  Genealogy Help - 1950 Census to bring up the series!

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THIS INFORMATION COULD HAVE BEEN BE VALUABLE TO GENEALOGIST and ANYONE INTERESTED IN THE HISTORY OF WOMEN!

C 2022 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

TWO MORE YEARS FROM TODAY'S DATE : THE 1950 CENSUS

STEVE MORSE and JOEL WEINTRAUB on the 1950 CENSUS - YOU WON'T FIND NAMES!

72 years of privacy for census was determined long ago when 72 years was one long life.  I sometimes wonder if this will be changed as our lifespans increase.

You can read the entire paper put out by these two gentlemen who have helped genealogists get through databases such as ship records and past census.

When the 1950 is first released you'll have to search page by page through Enumeration Districts until the massive undertaking of listing by name - indexing - happens.

The U.S. population after World War II was BOOMING (as in Baby Boomer) so while I have no doubt it eventually will be done, you may not want to wait another two to four years.

I remember when the 1940 came out.  I headed for my nearest Family History Center of the Latter Day Saints and I sat there for hours searching certain records in New Jersey... And what I proved weeks into it was that the first-generation immigrants and their children were no longer living where they had been in 1930, no longer in ethnic ghettos but out to the suburbs, even to other counties and states, some in old age homes.

I imagine the 1950 will show this movement into suburbs and other counties and states even more so. So many GI's got houses on the GI bill which afforded them small homes in the burbs!

C 2020  Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

Click on the tab  Genealogy Help - 1950 Census to bring up the series!

THREE MORE YEARS TILL THE RELEASE OF THE 1950 CENSUS

It's not too soon to learn a bit about this census, the seventeen United States Census, which will include the BABY BOOM generation. It will be released April 1, 2020. Work has already begun on the project to index it.  Here's some information!  STEVE MORSE 1950 CENSUS PROJECT UPDATE

UPDATE July 2019.  The release without indexing.  You'll be able to locate the ENUMERATION DISTRICT of ancestors who you may already know of from the 1940 to get to images prior to Indexing.

Click on the tab  Genealogy Help - 1950 Census to bring up the series!

CENSUS WORKERS for the 2020 CENSUS

I got a call from a friend, asking me if I was going to apply to be a census worker for the 2020 census or volunteer for the 1950 census project. These projects are going to be a HUGE endeavor, the 2020 many times more HUGE than the 2010.  The population expanded rapidly. It was the post World War II baby boom. Suburbs were being built and Americans were expanding out from living in cities. GI's were using the low interest mortgage rates for veterans to be home owners.  Stay at home moms were financially possible. Some of us are going to read this 1950 census in 2020 (or thereafter) and just wish we were living back in the day.

Genealogists get very excited about census and census is called "The backbone of American genealogy."

I have such memories of the 2010 reveal. The NATIONAL ARCHIVES SITE was not functioning completely or well for a while as people rushed to use it. Of course other database owners attempted to have theirs up better and faster.  Indexing lagged behind. Some pages were missing or out of order. I used the National Archives site at a few libraries including my local LDS Family History Center to get in there with my list of people who had not appeared on 1940.

These mix ups and frustrations one also experienced when the Ellis Island ship manifests site first went up.  I remember finding ways to get what I needed, ways to mine the data.  

I spent hours reading 1940 census pages one after another because they were not indexed yet with mixed results. I still wish I were turning microfilm rather than clicking the mouse till I need a forefinger joint replacement. 

I've learned a bit about the data on census and why looking at the name of the census taker can be a good thing. For instance I noticed German surnames of census takers associated with assignments of going into Polish and Hungarian neighborhoods. The language the census taker speaks may reflect the spelling of the surnames.

So pre-2010 of course I applied to be a census worker.  I took a class and the test and got an A.  Soon I got a call asking if I speak Spanish.  I do not.  I didn't get the job.  They wanted people to be in their own neighborhoods and mine at the time probably had a significant percentage of Spanish speakers. I met the man who did get the job.  He was frustrated.  He said that he had to go back to a building three times because he was having trouble being let in. People were not answering their doors. After three tries his supervisor would go with him and then would make the building manager let them in. Overall they thought they were encountering illegal residents who did not want to be on census or talk to anyone governmental. Probably true.

So I suspect in our political climate (i.e "Build the Wall") that the 2020 census next year will be fraught with such issues.  WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF CENSUS.  It's a statistical analysis that helps our government understand the population and these statistics are often cited when our officials are looking for causes or funding.

Although I do not believe in the past the census information was shared with the INS (or equivalent) people who are not citizens may worry.

Think of the past census, say taken of those Ellis Island immigrants in which census takers asked people if they were citizens, if they were aliens, if they were in process, and what year they were naturalized.  There is a historical precedent for asking residents about their immigration status. Sometimes when I cannot find people who left a ship on a census I wonder if they hid out for the same reasons as the people do in recent history.

C 2019  All Rights Reserved  including Internet and International Rights.  This post has been edited and expanded July 2019

OLDEST BABY BOOM IN AMERICA?

SCIENCE WORLD REPORT : OLDEST BABY BOOM IN AMERICA - NATIVE AMERICAN POPULATION

EXCERPT:

The researchers looked at a century's worth of data on thousands of human remains found at hundreds of sites across the Four Corners region of the Southwest. After studying these remains and the sites where they were located, the scientists were able to create a detailed chronology of the area's transition from a hunter-gatherer society to a farming society; stone tools revealed a transition from cutting meat to pounding grain.

Maize, or corn, was actually grown in the area as early as 2000 BC; yet it seems as if the people in the region were slow to respond. By 400 BC, though, corn provided about 80 percent of the area's calories. These new farming practices cause populations numbers to rise steadily until about 500 AD. Around 900 AD, populations remained high, but birth rates began to fluctuate. Then in the mid-1100s, one of the largest known droughts in the Southwest occurred. Spurred by this drought and other reasons, from the mid-1000s to 1280, conflicts raged across the northern Southwest.
While there were as many as 40,000 people in the Southwest in the mid-1200s, within 30 years it was empty.


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I've toured this area of the South West and have also taken a college level class on Native Americans of California and the South West.  My professor has said that usually people who've been said to have "disappeared" have actually responded to situations like this by joining another tribe, often as the lowest class of people in that tribe.

YOU MAY NOT BE A BABY BOOMER AFTER ALL : THE JONESERS

"If you were born between 1954 and 1965, you're not a Boomer. You're a Gen Joneser. You might be part of an engaged minority that's aware of (and very beholden to) this generational distinction. But more likely than not you're a Gen Joneser and don't know it. And that's because the term Generation Jones didn't exist until relatively recently, when social commentator/historian Jonathan Pontell put it on the map."

Linking to one of many articles that have come out recently about this newly recognized generation, this one by Debra Ollivier at the Huffington post.