Where in the world was Great Grandpa Wepsala in 1940? On a homestead in Adams county? Suffering from dementia in a Denver psychiatric facility? In a mental hospital in Pueblo?
At 7 a.m. Monday, Linda Vixie of Colorado Springs will be at her computer trying to solve the mystery of her great grandfather.
Vixie will have lots of company on the internet and in fact, the online server she?ll access just may crash from the crush of genealogy enthusiasts looking for clues to their family?s past.
That?s the hour for those in the Mountain Time zone when the 1940 U.S. Census will be released by the National Archives and Records Administration.
?I know a lot of people who are going to take the day off to look at it,? noted J Richards, education chairman of the Pikes Peak Genealogical Society.? ?
Some liken it to a Super Bowl moment.
Tim Blevins, head of special collections for the Pikes Peak Library District says it is more like a 50th wedding anniversary because it is saturated with history and personal meaning. ?You are searching for your family roots,? Blevins says. ?
The Penrose Library is throwing a public party from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.? Monday to celebrate.
Richards will explain how to use the 1940 census for genealogists and historian Richard Marold will appear as President Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss that era when the ?Greatest Generation? was wedged between the Depression and World War II.
Why the fuss? After all, the census has been taken every 10 years since 1790, created to determine how many representatives each state was entitled to send to Congress and later to allocate federal funds.
But 1940 is particularly a big deal.
? It will be the largest census record released so far, listing more than 132 million individuals, including? 21 million? living today. Like other censuses, the 1940 document is being released only after 72 years for privacy reasons.
? It?s the first time the government has released a census as digital images directly onto the Internet instead of microfilm. (The National Archives has partnered with archives.com, a family history website owned by Inflection, a Silicon Valley data company, to create a? launch site for the information that will include nearly 4 million images. The site is 1940 census.archives.gov.)
? It was taken at a momentous time in the country?s history.
? And last but not least, it included unique and intriguing questions that provide insight into the political climate of the time, as well as ancestors? lives.
Until 1840 only information about the heads of household was included on the federal census. Other family members were not named and were indicated only by gender and age. Over the decades, family members? names were added, along with additional information, thus providing treasure troves for sociologists, demographers, historians and genealogists.
The 1940 census includes standard data, such as names, ages, gender, race, education, place of birth, marital status, citizenship. ?
But it also asked questions so the government could assess New Deal programs, the Social Security Act passed in 1935, as well as the effect the Depression had on the displacement of families. ?
The forms tell who was questioned by the census taker, whether the person worked for one of the federal? relief programs such as the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps or National Youth Administration during the week the census was taken, March 24-30, 1940. It also asks for occupation, income and the number of weeks worked in 1939.
?Income was? a contentious question. More than 300,000 people declined to answer it,? Richards notes.
About five percent of people were required to answer supplemental questions:
? Birthplace of father and mother;
? Usual occupation, not just what they were doing at that time;
? Veteran status;
? Language spoken in home in earliest childhood;
? Whether they paid into the Old-Age Insurance program (the first name for Social Security) or Railroad Retirement in 1939;
? For women ? whether married more than once, age at first marriage and number of children born (not including stillbirths).
The answer to these questions are particularly fascinating for genealogists, Richards says.
Genealogists try to look at ancestors within the context of the historical times in which they lived. ?It?s a snapshot of your family at that specific place in time.?
The 1940 census answers give insight into the displacement that may have been suffered by families due to the Dust Bowl, or economics of the Great Depression. This is obtained by the unusual question, ?where did you live in 1935??
To have this sort of information at fingertips the moment it is released is exciting. Not so many years ago, local genealogists had to drive to the regional branch of the National Archives in Denver and spend many bleary-eyed hours dizzily rolling and reading microfilm to find census information, Richards noted. Now many genealogy companies have scanned and digitized records including censuses. These are available at the Penrose Library special collections in contract databases free to library users.
Vixie, who has done research since 1992,is thankful for technology.
?When we got our very first computer I got Family Tree Maker that used the old DOS 1.0. operating system,? she says with a laugh. ?It made pretty charts but that is about all.?
She is looking for her great grandfather William Wepsala?s last years, including possible time in a mental hospital between 1935 and 1940. He had immigrated from Finland to Massachusetts in the late 1880s, and then to Denver in about 1901.? He homesteaded in Adams County, and was a stonecutter and brick presser. (She has found a couple of old brick factories in Denver where he may have worked.)? His wife died of appendicitis in 1913, and his 22-year-old son died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. ?
?My dad (the late Glenn Masden) said he had lived with them for a while, and used to take a candle in a can to bed with him to keep warm, which upset his mother (Ludie Wepsala Masden) who thought he would burn the house down.?
In later years great grandpa developed dementia. ?In those days when poor families couldn?t care for such patients, the state provided care in mental hospitals,? she noted.? She has the address of his family?s home and a Denver psychiatric facility in that area, so will try to trace him on the census that way.
?But I?m not holding my breath. Institutions were not usually very good about providing complete or accurate information to census takers.?
She has records that show he died in 1944 in the Pueblo mental hospital.
Genealogical breakthroughs can be moments of ?great joy mixed with sadness,?? says Vixie, who edits the Pikes Peak Genealogical Society newsletter.
She recalled that several years ago she was at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and found her husband?s great grandmother listed on a passenger list from England to the U.S.
She had taken a ship from Norway to England first, which had been difficult to find in records.
?My heart was breaking. My father-in-law had just died. He didn?t get to see that information about his mother. I quietly wept and someone gave me some Kleenex.?
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Contact Carol McGraw: 636-0371 Twitter @mcgrawatgazette Facebook Carol McGraw
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