For those who remember the release of the 1940 US Federal Census on April 2, 2012, it took weeks, if not months to completely transcribe and index records so that users could search their ancestors by name. In the meantime, NARA made the images searchable online, but the servers repeatedly crashed due to high internet traffic upon release.
For the upcoming release of the 1950 US Federal Census on April 1, 2022, two pivotal events are in the works to avoid these issues:
First, Ancestry® has developed its own proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI) handwriting recognition technology to deliver a searchable index of the census. Ancestry® created the AI software to read handwriting from historical documents and transcribe the data, ensuring easy and quick searchability.
Ancestry® anticipates their indexing efforts will be completed within weeks.
For more information about Ancestry’s efforts, check out their press release.
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