April fools!

The US Census announced with great fanfare that it was making public the 1940 US census today. If you really need the info for the beginning of your genealogy search... Well, tough luck! The information is conveniently arranged by census district number only. Which means you don't need to know the name of the person you need to find, but you do have to have a considerable knowledge of where they lived. The process of converting the data into something useful like a listing by name is not being done with our tax dollars, but by volunteers. Which means that will be available who-knows and the area you need perhaps much later rather than sooner. I would suggest waiting till it hits the genealogy sites.

I tried finding my parents, with a guess about where they were living. The task is quite daunting. After about a half hour of sorting through descriptions of census districts (maps weren't loading today), I decided to try some other time.