My Experience With the 1950 Census/ How I've found hard to find people

 I live in Southern California so when the 1950 Census became available on April 1st just after midnight eastern time it was only 9pm  in California. I was able to search the census while still reasonably lucid. It was still a learning process. Searching by name often didn't bring up the correct person. The machine generated index does a fairly good job but you have to play with it sometimes. You can get thousands of possible matches when searching the index, or the right one may appear on top or on page 1.

How to search while waiting for the better indexes

Until a better index is ready, basically going through the 1950 Census and manually indexing it, the machine generated index is all that is available if you don't want to patiently wait.  

The NARA site recommends using a place and name of the head of household to search their index for the best results. That didn't always work for me. It didn't work for my Forgey family or my Kapple family in California. I did find my grandfather Kapple that way. 

Below you can see my grandfather Rudolph Kapple's first name isn't spelled correctly, but the last name was indexed correctly. His 2nd wife's last name is indexed as Kappu. 

I found out that if you use both the enumeration district and a name the search results can be much better.

For me anyway I've found the best technique for searching is to find the Enumeration District, or ED, using Ancestry.com's ED finder. This works well if you have the exact address for the family in 1950. 

My Forgey family didn't come up in the search results, or not in the first few pages, not by just searching on my grandfather's name, and place. Using the enumeration district it did appear at the top. 

Going through the ED district page by page I discovered no one was at home when the census taker came to the Forgey family door. 

Going to sheet 75 line 23, as noted, I did find my mother Edna and her family listed.

I didn't have the exact address of my great-great uncle Thomas Mullin who lived in Phoenix, Arizona in 1950. Searching on his name brought up the wrong Thomas Mullin. It brought up a man who was born in California and my Thomas was born in Ireland. I had his obituary and I used his place of death address to find an ED District. He died in a nursing home, but I figured he probably didn't live far away. I used the Steve Morse 1950 ED finder to look for the ED districts around the address. I tried 3 or 4 with the name Mullin in the search box, and eventually his name popped up at the top of the page. 

If nothing works just search the ED districts page by page. 

What did I find on the Census of Interest? 

I found the occupations the most interesting. I knew some of my family's occupations. I didn't know my great-uncle Edwin Mason worked in shipping for the railroad. Great Aunt Mary worked at a window manufacturing company. My aunt Dorothy June worked as a file clerk at an auto insurance company, and aunt Gloria was a typist at a life insurance company. 

My grandfather Rudolph Kapple was still working a Pullman, as his father before him did. 

It was sad to see Belle Kappel and her son Ronald living without William Kappel, Belle's husband and Ronald's father. William was killed in WWII Germany. A reminder of the war that was over only 5 years before the Census. 

Information that will lead to more research

My Kapple grandparents, Dorothy Mason and Rudolph Kapple, divorced in the 1940s. After the divorce my grandmother Dorothy decided to move to California with her 7 children. Her brother Frank already lived in California. Their brother Edwin also made the move along with their sister Mary Mason-Greene. Some members of the family flew out to California and other family members took the train. My father Robert J. Kapple came out to California by train with his aunt Mary. He loved the train ride out to California with the interesting views from the train. 

I used a postcard from 1948, sent by my aunt Diane (Daine in the census lol), to get the address of the family in Los Angeles. Apparently in mid 1948 only part of the family had arrived at their new home in California, but Diane said the family was coming soon in her message postcard. 

My grandmother made out the address and my young aunt wrote the message. 

I assumed those family members would include my great-grandmother Helen Mullen-Mason. When I didn't see her with the rest of the family on the 1950 Census I assumed she was visiting family or friends. 

I was very surprised to find Helen living in the basement of the former family home in Chicago. She had not come out to California in 1948 with the family. 

I thought my grandparents sold the house after they divorced? Did they continue to own it and rent out the upstairs and downstairs? Or did the new owners rent the basement to my great-grandmother? Francis Regan and his family lived downstairs, and Rosina Feehan and her children lived upstairs, in 1950. 

My Helen had family and friends living in Chicago and probably would have preferred to stay there. 

The basement had windows, thankfully, but the current windows don't seem to open. Hopefully they did open when my great-great grandmother lived there. Helen may have lived in a basement before? When she came to Chicago in 1899 she worked as a servant, possibly living in a basement? Living in the basement with water and electricity was likely better than living in the rural village in Ireland she was raised in. In 1950 her Irish relatives still had no electricity. 

The house as it currently looks with glass blocks as basement windows. 

I plan on doing some research on the house to find out when it was sold by my grandparents. I might have to visit Chicago to do that? 

Since my moneysaving great-great grandmother remained in Chicago a little longer, my family could keep the light bulb in the refrigerator a little longer and turn the heat up when it was cold. She definitely ruled the house when she lived with the family. 

Here we see my great-great grandmother is finally out of the basement and in California

 

The 1950 Census research was more interesting than I expected.