Have you signed up yet to index the 1940 census?  Volunteers have indexed just over 70 million names in the census.   Your help is needed to finish indexing the millions of names that still remain. How can you help? Join the 1940 Census Community Indexing Project at www.the1940census.com. To get started you will need to [...]

  Calling all Citizen Archivists!  The 1940 census has been online for two weeks now.  We have heard many great stories about people you have found in the census.  We also know there are some of you who don’t know where people were living in 1940 and therefore cannot search the census without an name [...]

Yesterday we made additional updates to the 1940 census site to correct issues with printing and downloading.  I am please to write that researchers are able to search, view, browse, print, and download images as of midnight on April 4th. Demand on the site was almost three times higher yesterday morning than on April 2nd [...]

We apologize for the problems you encountered with the 1940 census web site yesterday.  We share your frustration.   There was extraordinary demand for the 1940 census records, with over 37 million hits in the first 7 hours on April 2nd. We have implemented changes so you can now search and view the census images. We [...]

From coast to coast the National Archives is celebrating the 1940 census next week with events and workshops.  We hope you will join us! The National Archives at Boston will be offering a program called “The 1940 Census is Here Today!” on April 2nd.  Please email them at boston.archives@nara.gov for more information. The National Archives [...]

The 1940 Census is almost here!  When it opens on April 2nd at 9:00 AM (Eastern), the place to be is the National Archives’ 1940 Census web site.  We are excited to announce that our home on the web will be:  1940Census.archives.gov We invite you to visit today to watch the video featuring National Archives’ [...]

We’re excited to kick off Tag It Tuesday! In this new weekly feature we’ll be highlighting content from our online catalog that we invite you to tag. Curious about what tagging means and how you can get involved? Check out our previous blog post, in which we introduced the Online Public Access catalog’s new feature [...]

Do you have the opening of the 1940 Census on April 2, 2012 marked on your calendar?  We do here at the National Archives.  For past Census releases we provided access to the Census on microfilm.  For the 1940 Census we will be providing free online access.  You’ll be able to search on the internet using [...]

The National Archives at College Park (Archives II) will be closed for research on Saturday, July 30th due to building construction.  The Archives II Research Rooms will reopen on Monday, August 1st at 9:00 AM.  Thank you for your understanding while we undertake this work.  

Starting on Monday, June 6th if you make copies in our research rooms in the Washington, DC, area you will notice a difference in your copies.  Copies made on the self-service black and white printers in the research rooms or on the public use computers will be printed on Windsor Blue paper.   Why are [...]