Charles Bartlett was working his East Concord farm in 1940 with his wife Florence. His son Kenneth was making $520 a year as a bank messenger, while his 18-year-old daughter Marian was working for the National Youth Administration. Their two teenaged brothers were still in school.

Seventy-two years later, Bartlett’s descendants still operate Bartlett Farm Dairy on Josiah Bartlett Road. And in newly released census records, they can get a detailed snapshot of family life there at the end of the Great Depression and the eve of World War II.

“It’s very helpful to people who are trying to trace their family history or whatnot,” said Scott Bartlett, the farm’s co-owner and Charles Bartlett’s great-grandson. ‘But along with that, when things get out there, you have to worry a little bit, also.”

The National Archives and Records Administration this week released digitized records of the 1940 census, millions of pages containing detailed information about the 132 million people who lived in the United States at the time .

Genealogists say the newly released data is a windfall for family-history buffs, an opportunity for New Hampshire residents and others to find information about their parents and grandparents. But others are concerned that the massive data release violates personal privacy, particularly for the estimated 21 million Americans who were counted in the 1940 census and are still alive.

Claire Ebel, executive director of the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union, called it a “gross intrusion” to release information that she said was presumably given to census-takers with the understanding that it “would only be released in categorization form as part of the overall census data and that the individual census information . . . was privileged or private information. That is the presumption now.”

“If it can be violated for the 1940 information,” Ebel said, “I would think that people now being asked to comply with the 2020 census would have a reason to say no.”

The aggregate numbers from the 1940 census were released long ago. But the actual sheets on which census-takers wrote down information were kept confidential for 72 years, as required by federal law.

Those 72 years ran out Monday.

That’s when the National Archives released the more than 3.8 million pages of the census on a special website, 1940census.archives.gov.

Government officials touted the trove as a major resource for amateur genealogists, and the demand was immediate and overwhelming, crashing the database for much of that first day. (The servers have since been shored up.)

Census records “are one of the major sources if you’re just beginning to research your family,” said Bill Copeley, librarian at the New Hampshire Historical Society. And the 1940 census is more readily accessible than census records released in pre-internet days, he said, when records would only be available at scattered National Archives branches,

“I’m not surprised that there was this great surge to get these records once they were available,” Copeley said.

The records will be a boon for people interested in researching their family’s history, said Diane Florence Gravel, a certified genealogist who lives in Thornton and is vice president of the New Hampshire Society of Genealogists.

“Census records are probably the most commonly used (records) by both amateurs and professionals, and the 1940 census was taking place right at the end of the Depression and the beginning of World War II,” she said. “It’s good for finding relatives you didn’t know you had. It asked questions about military service and it also asked where a person lived five years earlier, at a time when people were moving around a lot because of the economic situation. That can open some doors.”

Still, it’s not definitive, Gravel and others said. The census records are handwritten and sometimes census-takers misspelled names or had trouble getting information from recent immigrants due to language barriers. The 1940 records aren’t yet searchable by name, though Gravel said a volunteer effort is under way to create a index of names.

And not everyone is happy. Privacy advocates like Ebel are concerned about the release of so much personal information.

“I guess my initial reaction would be, on what basis did data that was gleaned 72 years ago become sufficiently historic to not consider considerations of privacy?” Ebel said. “It would be one thing if it was the 1840 census, … if one could presume that everybody on that data card were dead.”

Ebel said the records could have been redacted to hide personally identifying information.

“That is not information that should be released by name,” she said.

72 years ago

The records for Concord and other communities across the nation are thorough, detailing occupations and earnings, home values and family relationships, hours worked and education.

For example, Robert O. Blood was a Concord physician and president of the state Senate in 1940. Later that year, the Republican would win the first of two terms as governor of New Hampshire.

The census records released this week show him living on Auburn Street that April, in a home valued at $20,000, with his wife Pauline, 13-year-old daughter Emily and two sons, Robert Jr. (18) and Horace (17).

Across town on the Bartlett family farm, Scott Bartlett’s grandfather, Stanley Bartlett, was 16 when the census was taken. He had completed two years of high school (and according to his 1999 obituary, he would graduate from Concord High School in 1941). His father Charles, then 55, had worked 84 hours on the farm the previous week.

Before he was a prominent Concord lawyer and three-term city mayor, from 1976 to 1981, Martin Gross was a 1-year-old boy living in an apartment in Manhattan. He was counted in the 1940 census with his parents, brother and the family’s Irish-born housekeeper. His father, Walter, then 44, was a corporate lawyer who had earned $5,000 in 1939.

Martin Gross said he’s found earlier census records, including the 1930 census information released in 2002, useful as he’s researched his family history.

“I had, over the last few years, discovered the charms of Ancestry.com and used it extensively. … The census data really is amazing, to let you know not just where people were living but also what they were doing for a living,” he said.

But while the 1940 census record is interesting, Gross said, it’s just one of many sources for family research.

“By 1940,” he said, “I was getting the information first-hand.”