Direct Me NYC 1940

The New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle yes­ter­day (“Crack­ing the Brand-New 1940 Cen­sus”), report­ing that at the New York Pub­lic Library’s Mil­stein Divi­sion of Unit­ed States His­to­ry, Local His­to­ry and Geneal­o­gy and the NYPL Labs have con­nect­ed 1940 phone books to the 1940 cen­sus to help researchers locate New York­ers in the 1940 US Cen­sus.

The http://directme.nypl.org/ site lever­ages the One-Step work of Stephen Morse and Joel Wein­traub.

This is a wicked­ly intel­li­gent way to con­cate­nate avail­able data.

The data­base allows you to start with a name and a bor­ough, find the per­son in the tele­phone direc­to­ry, use that to find the address, then use the address to find the 1940 US Cen­sus enu­mer­a­tion dis­trict. The site guides you through the process, includ­ing send­ing you over to Fam­il­y­Search to infor­ma­tion on the Enu­mer­a­tion Dis­trict you have dis­cov­ered.

This will pro­vide quite a bit of help for researchers who still have not found fam­i­ly mem­bers in the 1940 US Cen­sus, either because the names are indexed incor­rect­ly, or because there are “too many hits.”