Finally, Ancestry has posted a list of Delaware, Nevada and the District of Columbia available for searching in the 1940 federal population census. FamilySearch has a map that shows Delaware, and Colorado as seachable and Kansas, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Indiana, New Hampshire, Alaska and Wyoming as 100% indexed, Arizona, Virginia, Vermont, Idaho and Florida at 99% indexed. More to come as the indexing process races along.
After years of finding “missing” families in the census, I have read the entire enumeration district 56-31 and found 1330 DurrettLlane and 1350 Durrett Lane, Louisville, Jefferson Co., Kentucky, side by side. There should be another address in between those two on Durrett Lane, 1344 Durrett Lane which was the address of my grandparents’ farm. It is possible, but not probable, they were on a long vacation, visiting relatives in Lee Co., Georgia or somewhere else in the country. It is very unlikely they were living anywhere else.
1940 Census Index Updates
My grandparents purchased the family farm in the 1930s and farmed it together for a while with Herman Joseph Breitenstein Sr. and Marguerite Rosalie Herpel Breitenstein. Then Emil and Flora bought out Herman and Marguerite and farmed on their own. My great grandfather and his siblings, my grandfather and his eight brothers and my mom, my uncle and my aunt all grew up on this farm. I have a memory of driving to the farm from Wyoming, arriving way past the middle of the night, having my grandfather meet us outside with a shotgun, due to the middle of the night part not because he didn’t want to see us. I also have memories of planting seeds, eating outside in the playhouse, fishing at the pond and my aunt’s graduation. My grandparents sold the farm in 1960 to William King who turned it into Louisville Downs. Twenty years ago Louisville Downs sold the harness racing facility to Churchill Downs. It is now the Churchill Downs Trackside Training Facility with the entrance off Poplar Level Road.
The thick green line outlines the 78 acre Jacob Breitenstein farm. The light blue line was the driveway, now known as Breitenstein Lane and the turquoise line is Durrett Lane where the mail box was.
This map was taken from satellite portion of GoogleMaps 8 April 2012.
Below is a 1955 USGS map of the area. You can see the farm and the road/driveway into the farm, the house, the barn, the main farm road and the pond.
These two enumeration district maps almost help. They should have been in Enumeration District 56-31 where it reads Camp Taylor.
Does this ed 56-31 cover the area south of Durrett lane to Howard Lane or not? The farm is just south of the railroad tracks. I think it does.
So what does all this suggest? I would like to have seen this map with all its color connotations.
On the whole, it does seem likely that my grandparents, mom and uncle may have been skipped. I won’t know until the entire 1940 census is indexed, but they were not in the Enumeration District that their neighbors on each side were in. They were not in any surrounding Enumeration Districts. They were not living with any of his eight brothers, or his parents or her sister. I have not yet located her parents, but the odds are slim, especially if they were in Georgia that year.
