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No sooner had we sent out yesterday’s Genealogy Insider newsletter
with a
1940 census update, than Ancestry.com announced
the addition of six states to its free,
searchable 1940 census index.

Those new states are:

• Pennsylvania
• Ohio (yahoo!)
• Tennessee
• Virginia
• Colorado
• Vermont

Added to the existing Ancestry.com indexes for Delaware, Maine, New York, Nevada,
Washington DC, this makes 10 searchable states plus DC for Ancestry.com, and a total
of 34 states plus DC across all 1940 census index websites (MyHeritage and FamilySearch with
its 1940 Community Census Project partners).
The 1940 census is free to search on all these sites.
 
I immediately searched the Ohio index for my grandmother, who I knew was living with
her sister somewhere in Cincinnati in 1940. Right away I found her and a sister, living
with the family of another sister in a suburb just north of downtown.

She was a bookkeeper at a foundry. Now I just need to figure out where she met my
grandfather, an engineer staying
at the YMCA downtown in 1940.

This screenshot shows Ancestry.com’s new image viewer (still in beta). A window at
the bottom shows transcribed information, and one on the right shows source details
(you can make both of these windows disappear by clicking the double arrows on the
green tabs).

When you zoom in and can no longer see the name column, the indexed names pop out
from the left side—with the person you searched on and his/her household highlighted—so
you can keep track of the rows of names. For several columns, you can hover over a
cell and the transcribed information will pop up.

I’ve experienced a few minor glitches when moving around the record image using the
new viewer on a Mac.

Search Ancestry.com’s 1940 census here (the
page’s design makes it look like you’re just searching New York, but you can type
any of the indexed states into the Lived In field).