About a week ago I saw a post over at Family Tree User by Russ Worthington about preparing for the 1940 census.  In a nutshell he explained how to create a custom report listing everyone that was born  circa 1900 and was alive past 1940.  

In the initial list I started with 2500 names once again, when I filtered out anyone who died before 1940 my list dropped to about 500 names.  I then applied the filter for anyone born 1880 (Russ had it set for 1900) but I wanted a bigger net cast out.    This left me with a list of about 300 which is way more manageable.

Once this was setup, I had one concern how can I remove everyone that is not in the United States during that period and what would I use as a filter for that.  Thanks to another post by Russ, he was using residence for each Census year.  So he would have say 1880 - Drinker Street, Dumore PA, ED 22.    That way you can filter out based on residence facts.  

This is a very good idea and I am going to implement it.  But I ran into another problem.  The lack of citations in my records.  I knew this would end up hurting in the long run, I have all the documents collected but I have never connected them to the actual database.

I have a shared folder that is also replicated to Dropbox that has a folder for each surname, and then each individual has a folder inside their surname.  So I have tons of census records, photo's, obituaries, tombstones, but most are not linked.  Let alone no real citations.

So now I am going to go step by step through my database, add all the media, add all the sources, ect.  This should not take long right?  Only 2400 or so names to do, and I know this is a small database compared to some.  Lesson learned this time.

In the end I am still sort of prepared for the 1940 census, and well hopefully when the  1950 census is out I will be well prepared.