Depression-era census to be made public

It was a decade when tens of millions of people in the United States experienced unemployment and social upheaval as the nation clawed its way out of the Great Depression and rumblings of global war were heard from abroad.

Now, intimate details of 132 million people who lived through the 1930s will be disclosed April 2 as the U.S. government releases the 1940 census after 72 years of being kept confidential. Access to the records will be free and open to anyone on the Internet -- but they will not be immediately name-searchable.

The 1940 census release is expected to help researchers follow the movement of refugees from war-torn Europe in the latter half of the 1930s; sketch out in more detail where 100,000 Japanese Americans interned during World War II were living before they were removed; and more fully trace the decades-long migration of blacks from the rural South to cities.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard University professor and scholar of black history who has promoted the tracing of family ancestry through popular television shows, said the "goldmine" of 1940 records would add important layers of detail to an existing collection of opened census records dating to 1790. -- AP