The 1940 U.S. federal census will be released on Monday, April 2.

What does this mean?

The census images will be released, but they won’t be searchable until volunteers have indexed them. There is a drive going on to recruit volunteers for this effort.

How can I help?

Go to the 1940 Census Community Project and sign up to be a volunteer. You can put in a state or states you are interested in, but don’t restrict yourself to just those states. The faster the other states are indexed, the faster your state may be released.

You can download the indexing software right on that page or you can go to Family Search Indexing and click on Get Started. You should try at least one of the sample batches and also do some other indexing projects to get started. You can set  your preferences to the language you prefer and the degree of difficulty you think you can do.