SNGF: My 1950 U.S. Census Finds

It’s Saturday night and instead of disco fever we get a mission from Randy Seaver via his blog, Genea-Musings. The question this week is how did our 1950 census target list pay off.

My post of 12 March 2022 entitled “1950 U.S. Census Prep” detailed the list of eight families that I planned to look up immediately. That list was equally divided between my husband’s family tree and my family tree. Out of that initial list my hit ratio was 50%. I found three names for my family and one name for my husband’s family. Interestingly enough, I had difficulty locating my husband’s family located in Birmingham, Alabama.

The finds on my revised list are:

• Daniel R. and Anniece Salter (my parents) – 3rd St., Greensboro, Hale County, Alabama.
• Augustus and Arnita Jackson (my maternal grandparents) – Texas St., Mobile, Mobile County, Alabama. Their household included four grandchildren and a great nephew.
• Virginia Willis (my maternal great-grandmother) at Augusta St., Mobile, Alabama, in the household of her daughter and son-in-law. The household also included other children and grandchildren of my great-grandmother.
• Lamont and Katie Willis (my maternal uncle/aunt) on Green St. in  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with their son.
• Sam & Hattie Scovil (husband’s paternal great-grandparents) in Barbour County, Alabama with a son and several grandchildren.

All of them were found using in the name index using either the target’s name or, in multi-generational households, the name of a person known to be in the household. I did take the time to index the people in the household of interest to me, and several other names on the page (if they were legible).

My failures are:

• Frank Salter, my paternal grandfather in Hillsborough County, Florida. He could be in either Plant City or Tampa.
• My husband’s family in Birmingham: James Byers (father), Valencia Guice (mother), Gordon and Tullie Byers (paternal grandparents), Aaron A. and Ola Guice (maternal grandparents) and Chappell Guice (maternal great-grandfather).

When I browsed the census sheets for names in one of the likely ED’s in Birmingham, there were a great deal of houses marked as “no one at home”, with an indicated sheet / lines to go to for the actual enumeration. How to handle these households is explained in the blog post, “1950 Census: Let’s Understand a Few Important Things” by Claire Kluskens.

Now that my initial rush of excitement in the 1950 U.S. Census is over, I do not feel the need to browse the ED’s to find target family members. I will probably wait for one of the big companies to complete their index. But, if I get over caffeinated, I just might just gear up and plunge into browsing the last pages of likely ED’s to see if my targets were callbacks.