1940 is here but not an index in sight - YET

So the 1940 US Census has been released and I've scoured all the places I thought my parents might be.  Haven't found them yet.  I've found both sets of grandparents (in Valley County, Idaho), lots of aunts and uncles in both Valley and Gem County, cousins in Valley County and many familiar names in Boise County (Garden Valley and Crouch).

I read over Christina's timeline of where they were in the late 1930s and early 1940s and have followed up in each of those places:

9) Dad worked that summer in south Donnelly and lived in a collapsible house (I think this is those tent homes - wood sides up about three feet then sides and top of canvas).

10) Back to Cascade for the winter in a house on a hill by a shop.  They bought the house and moved it to under the water tower.  Christina Winnie was born there March 18, 1937.

11) Moved to an abandoned house in Werley (unsure where this was).

12) Went to Tonasket, Washington to visit Aunt Alice (Belle Crawford Marshall).

13) Back to Cascade (NOT THERE) in a collapsible house; it burned down, so the family moved to MacGregor (I actually found MacGregor, a community north of the Cascade Reservoir, south of Donnelly NOT THERE), living in a tent and piling brush for Boise Cascade.

14) They then moved to Emmett (NOT THERE) and bought a trailer house.  Cyril Ellis was born in May of 1941.  (Cyril’s doctor  was CE Carver and when mother named him the nurse who was the doctor’s wife came in and asked if she wanted to give him the rest of the doctor’s name C.E. – Cyril Ellis.  Mother had found the name Cyril in a book and liked it and Ellis is the only name she could find to go with it, so he wasn’t really named after his doctor even if it might have looked that way.)

15) They lived on Trail Creek in the trailer house (on the Salmon River) for three years, wintering in Cascade.  (There are pictures of the trailer with Cyril, Dixie, Tommy, and Christina – some with a tricycle, some with a trailer.  Uncle Cash must have worked there one year as Dixie is his daughter and she was in a lot of them.

I guess you can see why my folks are hard to find.  My father was doing a lot of work in the woods during the summers and wintered in Cascade or Emmett with family.  They did not really settle down to one place until they moved to Garden Valley in 1950.

Here the family is in the summer of 1937, just the four of them until Cyril was born in 1941 (Mom had lost her first child, a daughter, in June 1934).

With my father's parents in the Cascade census (Thomas and Winnie Logue) was their youngest son, Fred.  Below is a picture of him in his uniform as he visited home sometime between 1943-46.  His service during the war was at a radar station in Kodiak, Alaska. With him is my father at the left and their father, my grandpa, in the middle.  Grandpa passed away in 1954 (as I was beginning my first grade of school).

So, if you are anxious to find your family in the 1940 census, you may have to wait a while longer until the entire thing is indexed, or you can do like I do and spend a few hours a week just pouring over sets of records in areas where you think they may have been in 1940.  Whichever, it is fun to look through records that are closer to our day, possibly seeing a celebrity or someone that may still be living.

So have fun looking through 1940. And I will spend every spare minute I have indexing batches of records (right now I am working on Washington state records).