“We have about 400,000 volunteers indexing records all the time,” said David E. Rencher, the chief genealogical officer at Family Search. “For a project like this, where we’re bringing the community together, we’re going to get a bump, probably several hundred thousand, just to do this.”
That military is just one indicator of the national fascination with tracing family histories, a passion that traces Menashes back to the 1977 television miniseries “Roots,” which explored the journey from slavery to freedom of author Alex Haley’s ancestors. The program marked the dawn of the computer age and with it the ability to search literally billions of genealogical records online.
Experts in the field call genealogical records an important window into history. But deep down, they say, the records tickle most people’s minds to learn about their predecessors, discover surprises, and locate the occasional black sheep.
“Everyone has a natural curiosity about family history,” said Mr. racer. “It doesn’t mean you want to be a family historian. But there’s got to be a place you can go if you’re curious and say, ‘I wonder what my family was doing in 1950?’”
Taneya Koonce, chair of the Nashville branch of the Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society, said she would be online early Friday to look for records of her grandparents, who lived in North Carolina. But she said the 1950 plates are likely of particular interest to many African Americans because they help document the great migration of black families from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North.
“The census is such an important basic piece of information to have when doing family history,” she said. “You can research what was happening in the neighborhood at the time, how much income the family brought in, where someone was born.”
Menashes said the new records would give him a first look at his parents, who were still young children in New York City in 1950. “First of all, it’s interesting for me to know their addresses,” he said. “The New York archives contain these beautiful images of street scenes from the 1940s and 50s. It’s great to be able to associate an address with what a place looked like.”