API for 1940 One-Step Large City ED Finder

API for 1940 One-Step Large City ED Finder

Stephen P. Morse, San Francisco

This page is for website developers. It is of no use to genealogists

There are external websites that have collections of 1940 addresses. Some of these sites might like to provide links to the One-Step 1940 Large City ED Finder so that the ED Finder comes up with a secific address pre-selected. This would allow their users to obtain the desired ED with fewer key strokes. To allow for this, we have created an API (application program interface) to the One-Step 1940 Large City ED Finder. The API is as follows:

http://stevemorse.org/census/index.html?year=1940&state=<STATE>&fullcity=<CITY>&number=<NUMBER>&street=<STREET>
where

<STATE> is the two-letter state abbreviation
<CITY> is the city name, with spaces replaced by plus signs
<NUMBER> is the house number part of the address
<STREET> is the name of the street

For example: http://stevemorse.org/census/index.html?year=1940&state=DC&fullcity=Washington&street=Pennsylvania+Ave+NW&number=1600

The state will be pre-selected, provided it is one of the standard two-letter state abbreviations. If the city is one of those include in the One-Step city list for the designated state, it will be pre-selected as well. If the street, or some variation of it, is one of those included in the One-Step street list for that city, it will be pre-selected. And the house number will be pre-filled in the map section of the One-Step ED Finder.

There are many variations on a street name. For example, Brooklyn Avenue might be written as

Brooklyn Avenue
Brooklyn Ave
Brooklyn Ave.
Brooklyn Av
Brooklyn Av.

The program will make its best effort at finding the correct street in spite of the variation of the street name used in the API. Although it will succeed most of the time, there will undoubtedly be variations that it will not recognize. For example, if the API specified Bklyn Ave, the program will probably not be able to find the correct street. In those cases, the city and state will still be correctly pre-selected, but the user will have to manually select the desired street.