1950 census release offers snapshot of suburban boom 

The personal responses people gave on the 1950 census, scheduled to be released Friday for the first time, will provide details of the post-World War II era at a time when the nation's population was beginning to expand into the suburbs, such as Long Island, experts said, noting such records would be a boon to professional researchers and amateur genealogists alike.

The 1950 census came at a time "Where we see the first construction of massive post-war suburban residential communities like Levittown, which become a model for the growth of large-scale suburban development across the country," said Christopher Niedt, an associate professor of Applied Social Research at Hofstra University, and the academic director of the university's National Center for Suburban Studies.

Historical census records show Nassau County's population ballooned from 406,748 in 1940 to 672,765 in 1950, as many people moved from New York City to Long Island. Suffolk County's population grew from 197,355 to 276,129 in that decade.

"This is the first time that historians and sociologists have been able to study the post-war suburbs in detail," Niedt said of the kinds of granular level of detail contained in the 1950 census. "This was a period when working-class whites, in particular, gained access to suburban homeownership on a massive scale for the first time. It was also a period when high-wage blue-collar and white-collar jobs powered the growth of the new middle class and gave them access to suburban homeownership.

"In the past, we’ve been able to study this phenomenon at the community level. But the detailed data that is being released allow us to study it at the neighborhood, and even household, level for the first time. Previously, we were limited to whatever tables the census [bureau] released in a given year," he added.

Reine Bethany, Hempstead Village historian and editor of the Freeport Herald, said she had "tremendous interest" in the 1950 census.

"It would show a lot about the racial picture, how race was being handled at that time," she said. "The village was always one of the places where Black people were allowed to live, where they were fairly comfortable living, relatively," Bethany said, noting other communities weren't as welcoming of Black people back then.

"I think it would show a lot of things about who was doing what in the village; who had what jobs, certainly how racial designations were categorized and how the people themselves answered that," Bethany said. "It would show a lot about how women were working in the village, the overall wealth of the village. To me that would be of great interest, and how that compared to the rest of … [Nassau] County."

While statistical data from every decennial census are publicly released starting a year or so after the census was conducted, the responses individuals give on census forms are kept confidential, by law, for 72 years. 

The National Archives and Records Administration, which maintains census records after the U.S. Census Bureau finishes with its data tabulations, was scheduled to release the 1950 census, free to the public, at 12:01 a.m. Friday. It can be located on the agency's website: archives.gov/research/census/1950.

There will be many ways to search for information.

Claire Kluskens, NARA's genealogy and census records subject matter expert, said during a news conference in March that researchers can search by state, county, Enumeration District Number, Indian Reservation name and by personal name.

She explained the personal name search "will return both exact and similar name. Most importantly, there's a transcription tool that will allow users to correct the name results. As always, the more information a researcher brings to their search, the more successful they will be, as many people have the same or similar name."

The 1950 census only recorded the surname of the head of the household, or those in the household with a different surname, officials said. 

Sharon Tosi Lacey, Census Bureau chief historian, noted during the news conference that the 1950 census was the first taken after the end of World War II.

"We saw people had moved for war work, and we had a migration of more than 1.4 million African Americans to the West and the North. We saw greater education opportunities, via the GI Bill. And we saw the beginning of the Baby Boom and immigration from Europe.  Along with the population growth, we saw a building boom. And for the first time over half of all homes were owner-occupied."

Marc J. Perry, the bureau's senior demographer, said the 1950 census "opens a window into the most transformative period in modern history." 

By Olivia Winslow

olivia.winslow@newsday.com@newsollie