Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, has announced that it is joining forces with Archives.com, FamilySearch International, findmypast.com and the National Association of Records and Archives in the 1940 US Census Community Project, a collaborative effort to index the contents of the newly released US 1940 Census. ProQuest will add the new census content to its acclaimed HeritageQuest Online service, one of libraries’ most valued and widely used genealogical tools.
ProQuest’s participation in the project provides major financial support to the indexing effort, which enables all its partners to ingest content more affordably, providing timely delivery to their users.
The 1940 U.S. census records were released by the National Archives on April 2 after a mandatory 72-year waiting period. Its 3.8 million pages include names, addresses and family members of virtually every one of the country’s 132 million citizens, an information bonanza for the burgeoning numbers of Americans who are tracing family trees. While the data is available on the 1940 Census website, it is not searchable by name.
The 1940 U.S. Census Community Project aims to create simple searching of the census by indexing its contents. It’s a labour-intensive task that the project partners are tackling by organising teams of volunteers who are turning the thousands of census pages into searchable records linked to digital page images. Each organisational member behind the project will then ingest both images and indexed records in their services, making the content easily accessible.
ProQuest's HeritageQuest Online service is available through more than 7,000 libraries – both inside buildings and online via the library’s website – including 20 state-wide portals. The service is popular among genealogists for its search results that can be sorted in multiple ways – by first name, last name, age, gender, place, and so on. The sorting feature allows searchers to zero-in on family members for which they have scant information and also find family members whose original records include errors, such as misspelled names.
