Choosing the correct Enumeration District

These steps begin after you've selected a state and county that was canvassed in the 1940 U.S. Federal Census, as guided in another blog post. Your working area should look like this.

Working area—ED descriptions for state and county

You can choose one or more of these views.

• If you don't know a name for the area you want a census page for, use the map images to help you find the town, city, ward, or portion of the county (township) and its ED (enumeration district).
• If you have the name for the city, ward, town, or township, use the descriptions to find the ED. The working area shows the descriptions automatically.
• If you have the ED, use the ED list to go immediately to the pages you want.

Map view

Let's work from the Maps view, which lists all available maps that show the EDs for your county. Usually one map shows the full county and its EDs, and another map shows each city or town that has election wards. Some election wards may have more than one ED.

1. Selectfor the county or town.

2. Slide the view bars (at the bottom and right side) to show different parts of the map.
• The small black squares are houses.
• Houses in towns are usually not shown.
• State and U.S. Highways are identified.
• Railways and county roads are mapped but not always identified.
• Usually the boundaries of townships are also boundaries of EDs.
• The ED numbers are usually written in large but fainter numbers. 
• In the example (right), Cawker township has ED 62-11, and Cawker City has ED 62-10.
3. Jot down the EDs you want to view. 
4. Selectto view another page and find other EDs for the county or city.
5. Selectwhen you've reviewed all pages of the map.
6. If you want, repeat steps 1 through 5 for another map.
7. Go to Descriptions view or Census Schedules view, below.

Descriptions view

Let's work from the Descriptions view.

1. Scroll though the groups of descriptions to a group you want to view.
2. Selectto see all the EDs for the group.
3. Jot down the ED you want to view.
4. Repeat these steps for all EDs you're interested in.
5. When you've found all EDs, select(above the descriptions).

Census schedules view

Let's work from the Census schedules view. You can review the actual pages written by the census enumerator in this view, but you can also copy the pages to your computer. (This is downloading the file.) I suggest downloading the file so you cam work without using the NARA computer resources and so you have your own copy of the census record. Go to the next blog post.