The following is an extract from an email message I received from Joe Dolinak:
We've got a website started, http://censusgenie.com, which you or some of your followers may find useful. The website will house many tech-inspired tools for the researcher to use in their searches. Some of these tools will allow the user to be more specific in their searches, some tools will allow the user-interaction to be more enjoyable, and some tools will show results in a new perspective.
The website is initially geared to the 1940 census. Other websites have created indexes, but only a certain percentage of households have been transcribed accurately (or even initially recorded correctly by the census taker). For those hard-to-find families, our tools can be used.
Some of the nice-to-have search tools are: search by family size, search by ages and genders within the family (e.g., when you suspect the family name has been misspelled), search within a certain number of miles of a location (e.g., to search western PA, but not include Philly), etc.
Some of the nice-to-have presentations of the census images are: being able to scroll through the forms mimicking the scroll of a microfilm roll, looking at colorized images rather than black- and-white images, etc.
Another nice-to-have is the ability to input a modern day street address, and get back a colorized map of the block and enumeration districts for that address. I believe this may be the only block-number tool available today.
The website will become subscription-based in a few weeks, as we bring more tools online, make more accurate those tools which are already online and correct a few bugs. Currently some of the areas are grayed out for this purpose.
You can learn more at https://www.censusgenie.com/.
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