I find so little time right now to work on my genealogy. Sometimes it seems like months go by without a chance to do any online research. And forget going to Clayton Library – I haven’t had a free afternoon to do that in a couple of years. But tonight I was looking at a few families in my genealogy database and realized that I had 1930 census data for them, but none for 1940. It has been 3 years since the release of the 1940 data and it has been fully indexed, so what took me so long to get around to searching through it?!
I’m using the free 1940 index at FamilySearch, since I let my Ancestry subscription temporarily lapse for the first time in about 15 years of usage.
Let’s start by finding out how many households in 1940 were headed by someone surnamed Buntyn, then go on from there…
54 heads of families with exact spelling of Buntyn, in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas.
203 people with exact spelling of Buntyn
None of my grandfather’s immediate family is listed with the proper spelling of our surname.
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10,457 people with spelling variants of Buntyn, including Banton, Buntan, Bunten, Buntin, Bunting, Bunton (all part of Soundex code B535)
Narrow to first name of Joe: 396 people
Narrow to residence of Texas: 19
Ah, there’s great-uncle Joe Clarence Buntyn enumerated as “Joe C. Bunten” in Harris County, Texas.
But where’s my grandpa, Joe Stanley Buntyn? I’m not locating him at all.
So I’ll go about this a different way. I’ve been told that my grandpa lived down the street from his sister Fayne Leatherwood Gibson around 1940. Can I find her?
Yes, I found Aunt Fayne, with the proper spelling of her name, how about that? She is included on film number 005458105. Clicking on the film number takes me to a search page for that film, 37,946 people indexed on it.
Narrow to first name of Joe: 1,846 people
Narrow to birth year of 1909: 25 people
And there’s grandpa, listed as “Joe Bentzen” with his spouse “Alma Bentzen”. Not in the same Soundex range at all (Buntyn and variants have Soundex code B535, Bentzen has Soundex code B532).
Aunt Fayne and her husband apparently lived in a duplex with my grandparents, as they share the same house number, but are enumerated as a different family number. Interesting…
Joe Buntyn household and Harold O. Gibson household, 1940 U.S. Census, 6925 El Paso Street, Tract 7, Houston, Justice Precinct 1, Harris County, Texas.
I’ll be working on adding the census information for my extended families to my database for several months…
