Lucas County as it was in 1930 - its residents, neighborhoods, and strands of its personal histories - has been crammed into 10 teal-green boxes in downtown Toledo.

Your great-grandfather might be there among the newly released U.S. Census microfilms. Did you know he had a first wife?

Or maybe it's that black-sheep uncle no one wanted to talk about. You know, the one left out of chatter at family reunions and erased from that tattered obituary page in your family Bible.

Did you know that your great-aunt was a seamstress before she married?

Recently, the U.S. Census released the personal information it gleaned from its field clerks from its 1930 report. The data for the entire state is available at Fremont's Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center.

Statistical information from the census, such as the fact that there were 347,709 residents that year in Lucas County, was released shortly after census enumerators sent in their reports.

But by federal law, certain personal information is kept confidential for 72 years.

“The idea is that if the information won't be released until after you're long gone, you might be a little less reluctant to talk about yourself when the census-taker knocks on your door,” said Jim Marshall, manager of local history at the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library. “Your neighbor won't be checking up on you,” he said.

But now, seven decades later, information from the census-takers who went home-to-home in Ohio and Michigan - recorded in flowing, handwritten ink - is available to you, your neighbors, and the general public.

Though most of it is fairly mundane - number of residents in households, for example - some of it speaks to the time.

Home values are listed at just a few thousand, or even a few hundred, dollars. Occupations include “stenographer,” “stable man,” and “sales lady.”

Most homes don't yet have radios.

It was a few years before televisions appeared in living rooms, and decades before the new contraptions would carry the message of Gloria Steinem and women's lib.

The instructions to the 1930s census-takers are clear: “There are many occupations, such as carpenter and blacksmith, which women usually do not follow.”

If the occupation a woman lists sounds “peculiar,” the instructions warn, “verify the statement.”

The microfilm information from Michigan and Ohio cost the library system $8,568, but it's worth the cost because about 17,000 patrons use the library's local history department each year, said library spokesman Chris Kozak.

Those who research their family histories can stumble across information that might be otherwise unavailable in obituaries, naturalization documents, and vital statistics or cemetery records, he said.

Becky Hill, a librarian at the Hayes Center, said the data is popular with people doing genealogy research.

“The census might send you out on a whole new branch of your family tree,” Mr. Kozak said.

First Published August 7, 2002, 10:30 a.m.