WOW, you make me feel completely inadequate in preparing for the 1940 census. My family seemed to be quite mobile during the 20′s through the 30′s and am afraid I will be doing a lot of fruitless browsing until an index is completed. But who knows, sometimes I get lucky.

You’ve given me some ideas on getting myself prepared.

Researchers aren’t going far enough in using our Large City ED finder on the stevemorse.org site. In most cases you should get down to a single ED #. The problem is the short instructions we have to add a “cross street or back street” after you put in your target street. Those cross streets and the back street should be on the same physical block as the original address. In addition, we want you to enter both cross streets AND the back street on that physical block if you haven’t gotten down to a single ED #. There are situations due to the geometry of the blocks, and even situations where I put in street names that aren’t in an ED (for example, for NYC EDs that are 1/2 block in size, I added in the other two street names on the block). where you can’t get down to a single ED #, but in most cases you should.

So I suggest that researchers who haven’t gotten down to a single ED # in a large city, and haven’t entered the other 3 street names on the same physical block, to go back and redo their searches.

Another thing you should know, is that if you did get down to 2 EDs, you can click on the ED # box and see the text definition which in large cities does not show any street names. However, on that definition line, you will see a column labelled T1224 and beneath that “view”. If you click on view it will show you the scan of the ED definition for that number, and you **will** see the street names within that ED, and they will be for ***each** block in that ED…. and they will be in the order of north/east/south/west side of the block. Thus you should using this information decide which ED is the one you want to search. You don’t need to use the city maps.

Hope that helps.

Joel Weintraub
https://sites.google.com/site/census1940/