For the first week to several weeks after April 2, the only way to find your ancestor's 1940 census record will be to browse by enumeration district.
You can find out what an enumeration district is and how to pinpoint the right one by watching the free video on FamilyTreeMagazine.com.
Three separate projects to index these census records by name will begin ASAP after the records are released:
the 1940 Census Community Project, organized by FamilySearch, Archives.com and brightsolid (owner of censusrecords.com)
Ancestry.com
MyHeritage
The 1940 Census Community Project is recruiting volunteers to do the indexing; Ancestry.com and MyHeritage are using paid contractors to do their indexing work.
Each site will add its index one state at a time, as states are completed. No site has specified the order in which states will be indexed, so at this time there's no telling when a particular site will add your ancestor's state. It could be weeks or months before a given site posts the index you need (so you'll want to check all the above sites periodically).
Ancestry.com is completing its index in two phases: a basic name index to be released first on a state-by-state basis, then a more-detailed index with additional information to follow. This means you may have access to a searchable basic name index for your ancestral state earlier on Ancestry.com than on another site.
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