Currently 1940 Census Records for Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maine, Nevada, and New York are indexed, but we may be able to help you find your ancestor even if our state hasn’t been indexed yet.
“Do you have a street address?”
If you do not have a street address, you could go to the Texas/Dallas Archives collection on the 7th floor and use a city directory, such as the 1940 Dallas City Directory, to find an address for your ancestor.
*If your ancestor is from another state, see the information below.
Once you have a street address you are ready to proceed.
A sample address such as 5114 Denton Dr. could then be looked up at the website stevemorse.org/census/unified.html and it will give us an Enumeration District, in this case 255-12. On Ancestry.com, which you can access in Genealogy on the 8th floor, use the ED number and click on 255-12. This district is 32 pages and you would have to go through in order to find 5114 Denton Drive. The name of the street is on the left side of the census and the house numbers are the first column. On E.D. 255-12 sheet 7A we find that Clarence Stoner and his family were living on 5114 Denton Drive in 1940.
The 1940 census will give age, place of birth of the head of family and family members living at the address as well as occupation.
*Other ways we can find an address of those who are from other states will be from a WWII Draft application, or a Naturalization Record which can be found on Ancestry.com.
The non-profit site familysearch.org (full disclosure: like many genealogy sites, it is affiliated with the Latter-day Saints church) has many tips as well. They are working to index all the census documents, but it takes them a long time because their quality-control process includes having each page indexed by two separate indexers, then having an arbitrator review each pair of indexed results to clear up any discrepancies. The states completing this process first seem to be working largely eastward from the West Coast, which would make sense since the LDS church is stronger there and many of their society members are active indexers.
I found that once I had street addresses (which often can be obtained by searching the same family in the 1930 census, by the way), using Google Maps helped me to decipher the boundaries of the enumeration districts. So far, I’ve found both parents, both maternal grandparents, my maternal grandmother, and several great-uncles and great-aunts. My paternal grandfather is more of a challenge, as he was an itinerant junk dealer, not only changing addresses from one year to the next, but cities and occasionally states. I suspect that unless I want to comb every page of the Houston census records, my best bet is waiting for the Texas index to be finished.
Incidentally, if you’ve time and are a good typist, you can contribute to the FamilySearch indexing project and speed up the process! I’m indexing and so far have run across many family members simply by happening to index the page on which they appeared. You can choose which state to index, though not the city or county. (I mentioned the LDS connection not as a pro or con, but because I know some people have religious objections and would not want to contribute; for my part, I’m neutral toward the genealogy aspects and therefore am contributing simply because I want the index to be done quickly and well.)
Oops, that should read “paternal grandmother.”