NEW YORK (AP) -- It was a decade when tens of millions of people
in the U.S. experienced mass unemployment and social upheaval as
the nation clawed its way out of the Great Depression and
rumblings of global war were heard from abroad. Now, intimate
details of 132 million people who lived through the 1930s will
be disclosed as the U.S. government releases the 1940 census on
April 2 to the public for the first time after 72 years of
privacy protection lapses. Access to the records will be free
and open to anyone on the Internet -- but they will not be
immediately name searchable. For genealogists and family
historians, the 1940 census release is the most important
disclosure of ancestral secrets in a decade and could shake the
branches of many family trees. Scholars expect the records to
help draw a more pointillistic portrait of a transformative
decade in American life. Researchers might be able to follow the
movement of refugees from war-torn Europe in the latter half of
the 1930s; sketch out in more detail