1930 Census

[meles]

I've had an e-mail from Ancestry.com, giving me free access to the 1930 US census.  . It's for three days   and you can't save the images  . But very useful - found the answer to one who had vanished  .

Anyone else got this offer?

meles

[Lambendsor (aka IGS)]

I did today. It's awful slow and very dumbed-down and all the fancy graphics get in the way (as opposed to regular Ancestry) - but that still didn't stop me from finding some distant cousins that I'd been neglecting.

The trouble with the 1930 Census, I've found, is that it's poorly scanned (compared with the 19th Century US Censuses) and the transcriptions are a bit suspect. I think the enumerators in the 1800s used dip pens (quill or steel nib), so they wrote a little more carefully and deliberately and their letterforms had more variation to them, thereby making it easier for us to decipher their hieroglyphics. The enumerators of the 20th Century, however, seem to have used fountain pens that made a thicker line of a single weight; they wrote more hurriedly because they didn't have to keep dipping their pens in an inkwell or worry about blotching; and they had to fit more data into less space. Anyway, I've found the 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930 Censuses to have loads of valuable information, but also to be very difficult to search and read.

Sorry - my frustration has gotten the best of me!