Can't find relatives in the 1940 U.S. Census? Try a FamilySearch search!

This is how I was able to finally find my mother and her parents in it.

No, really. It was that simple.

Tonight I was doing a search for another record on FamilySearch.org (my favorite go-to site, and it's FREE), and noticed that results for the 1940 census were coming up. Really? I thought, I didn't think it was supposed to be indexed by name yet. I hadn't even bothered trying to search by name because I had assumed it wouldn't work.

Just for giggles, I typed in my maternal grandfather's name, and then entered "1940" in the "residence" field, and boom: there were my maternal grandparents and my not-quite-3-year-old mom. My grandfather Henry was only 27, and my grandmother Dorothy was only 21. Just kids themselves, really, though I'm sure people back in the early 20th century grew up faster than they do today.

So if you have relatives you can't find in the 1940 census, do a search for them on FamilySearch.org.

Original documents versus transcriptions

FamilySearch.org is probably my favorite go-to site for genealogical research on the web; not only do they have tons of records that you can't find anywhere else, but they also often provide images of the original documents as opposed to just electronic transcriptions of them.

Original documents or images of them are preferable to transcriptions for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, they are more reliable. Records that have been electronically transcribed were done so by human beings, for whom English is not a first language in some cases (Ancestry.com has much of their transcription work done in China).

Example of an error that can occur in transcription: a transcribed census record from Ancestry.com lists one of my ancestors as being 70 years old, but when an image of the actual census was pulled up and examined, his age was found to be listed as 30, not 70.

Secondly, transcriptions often leave out information contained in the original documents.

I had a transcribed death record for my 3rd great-grandfather William Winslow, but checked back yesterday to find that FamilySearch.org now has the original record available. I clicked on it, and was able to see the cause of William Winslow's death, which was... ahem... "intemperance and exposure."

So I now know that Great-great-great grandfather William was probably staggering home after a few too many at a local pub or something when he passed out in the freezing February snow and never awoke.

Not a terribly flattering vignette of my ancestor, perhaps, but it's one that I wouldn't have if I relied on a transcription instead of the actual document.

Another great records resource: FamilySearch

I've spent the past month or so going back in my family tree trying to verify that the lines are correct-- that I haven't accidentally followed the wrong family or anything. That happens a lot when you rely on some random person's personal genealogy information.

You need to have records and sources as evidence that your tree-- and the people in it-- are correct.

To that purpose, I've been trying to hunt down records of my ancestors from New Hampshire. They're proving far more difficult to track down than my Massachusetts ones, who have excellent and thorough records dating back to the 1600's. New Hampshire historical vital records, on the other hand, are not easy to find, at least not online.

Thankfully, I stumbled upon a great FREE database (I'm all about "free") called FamilySearch.

Here I was able to access records for, among others, my great-great grandfather, George Bailey Palmer, his wife and my great-great grandmother Mary (Purinton) Palmer, and her father Isaiah F. Purinton.

Above is a picture of a picture of Mary Purinton Palmer (the actual photo is unfortunately lost-- temporarily, I'm hoping). On the back of this was written, "Mary Olivia Palmer, 1851-1898. Wife of George Bailey Palmer and mother of George W. and Frank Bailey Palmer. 1926." It's only thanks to this inscription that I know who this was and had enough information to trace her lines back.

Death records, which seem to be the most plentiful in this database, give all kinds of information: exact birth date and birth place, names of parents (often including the mother's maiden name), death date and death place, cause of death, and burial place.

I found that, for birth records, these old records sometimes list the person's age at death instead of an actual birthdate: for example, Mary Purinton Palmer was "46 years, 8 months, and 4 days" old at the time of her death, which was July 13, 1898. It just took a bit of math to figure out that she was born on November 9, 1851.

I also discovered that she died of cancer, though the record didn't specify what type. More interestingly, her father Isaiah (1818- 1890) is listed as having died of "cholera morbus" at the age of 71.

According to Wikipedia, "cholera morbus" could refer to either actual cholera or any general form of gastroenteritis.

A neat thing about some of these genealogical databases is that you can see and download the actual documents, not just see secondhand the information in them.

This database isn't just for New Hampshire, by the way, but appears to have records from all over the world.