Volunteers Needed to Put Names from 1940 Census Online

The National Archives is asking for your help in getting the millions of names from the recently released 1940 Census online so that families can search by name for their relatives.

The personal information collected from each family counted in the 1940 was released last week by the National Archives online. So many people signed on in the first hours, they crashed the National Archives website.

The National Archives put online copies of the actual census pages. You have to know where your relatives lived to find them. You can't search by their name. The National Archives needs volunteers to type the names from the census pages into a searchable database.

"Everyone all over the country is indexing," said Dorothy Flores, a family history consultant at the Family History Center in McLean, Va. "Everyone is typing in what the (census) sheets say,” Flores said.

There are indexing directions on the National Archives site.

4 Things to know about the 1940 Census:

1. You can search the website for free.

2. Millions of people listed in the 1940 Census are still alive and walking history books about your family.

3. You can find out not only where your relatives lived but also how much they earned and their house.

4. The Census also includes information on race, age, exactly who was living in the household and how they were related to the head of the household.

How to find your family in the 1940 Census.

Interested in helping to index the 1940 census? Join the 1940 census community indexing project at The1940Census.com and start creating a name index for the 1940 census.