Fun With Censuses & Email

[Cybergata]

I have found some very interesting information from looking through censuses, and I'm wondering if others have also found their own interesting Census information.

I found that my grandmother's grandmother was in the Pennsylvania State Mental Hospital for the Mentally Insane from the 1900 census. All the time I thought she was still living in Nebraska. This could answer a lot of questions. :-) Or maybe not.

I found that one of my husband's ancestor's, whom family member are still named after, grew up in the same home with her future husband when he was 8 and she was 14. Her father died in a prison camp in South Carolina during the Civil War. I don't know what happened to her mother, but her future husband's family took her and her brother in. One can only wonder what was inspiring between her and her future husband while living in the same household as teenagers. :-)

Does anyone else have anything other interesting Census finds?

I started emailing web page authors and getting amazing returns. I wrote to thank a person who had put the grave stone of one of my ancestors who had fought in the War for Independence on-line. Turns out he is my 5th cousin, and not related to the person the gravestone belonged to. Finding my cousin Kevin opened new lines I never knew I had. Plus he I really like him and it is great to find another cousin on-line.

I also ask the person whose email address was on the Erie County, Pennsylvania RootsWeb site when they were going to update their pages (the date was 2005). I mentioned my three ancestors who were from that county, and he sent me back what was written on the tombstones of all their graves, and I noticed the very person I thought was in Nebraska was buried in the Waterford Cemetery.

Genealogy People on the Web are amazing. I can never stop thanking them for the help they provide.

[Gormy Cuss]

1. I always recommend that people read the entire census page

and in small towns, the whole enumeration. I've found relatives farmed out to aunts and uncles and discovered that often a later married couple had been raised in adjacent homes. That's huge when you know little about one set of parents. By searching through census records for all siblings I was able to prove that my gg-grandmother did indeed live to be nearly 100. In her last three decades she was living with different extended family and her name and age were mangled just enough to thwart finding her through indexes. One of these days I hope to use these clues to figure out where she is buried.

And I have had so many great finds through the kindness of strangers. One woman emailed me a picture of my grandfather as a newly enlisted man -- none of his children had ever seen this portrait. She had it because my grandfather had sent it to her father.

[Cybergata]

3. In Census Records . . .

I love your story about your grandfather's photo. The internet has allowed us to connect with people who passed through our families lives in ways we never knew before.

I too find that people who married each other lived in close vicinity of their spouse before they were married. Celia Walker lived next door to Matthew B. Cole, whom she married.

The Spanish censuses in New Mexico are even better because they always give the womens names by their pre-marriage name. Just like in the U.S. Censuses, families can be found living near each other. There weren't a lot of marriages to the girl next door since they were to follow the church law to marry people 5 times removed and the girl next door had to be at least your 1st to 4th cousin.

I've been working on my maternal grandmother's genealogy which all ends up in Massachusetts. One thing that I've noticed that in families, more than one child will marry into the same family. This past year I've been taking a much closer look at siblings, and have found a wealth of information by doing so.

Of course I have I have one word to say, and that is HERITAGEQUEST, if you are lucky enough to have a library that subscribes to it.

[madinmaryland]

9. Heritage Quest is great. We have that through our library, also, and can

access it remotely with your library card. They also have ancestry.com, but you have to go into the library to access. I'm too lazy to drag all my stuff with me to the library.

[CBHagman]

2. I also check city directories.

If you haven't done so already, look at city directories for the years and locations you're researching. You can find them on microfilm in local libraries, the Library of Congress, genealogical societies, etc. Some of them are transcribed online, either at free or paid sites.

The city directory is a good way to fill in the gaps and clarify facts. For example, you can establish who was old enough to have a separate entry in the city directory and what job they had. In one or two branches of my family tree, there was a huge amount of lying about ages. My great aunt even had some appendix to her death certificate to clarify the age -- falsely, as it turns out, as she is listed as age 66 but entries in city directories, censuses, and even a newspaper point to a birth year a decade, perhaps a decade and a half earlier than claimed.

City directories also tip you off to living situations. For example, I learned that my great-grandfather boarded at his future father-in-law's house. I had this sudden image of my Irish great-great-grandfather bellowing that the Beckett boy was interferin' with his Agnes. Did great-grandpa court great-grandma because they had earlier lived within blocks of each other, or did he get involved with her because he boarded in her parents' house? I was even suspicious enough to count the weeks between their wedding and the birth of their first child.

[Cybergata]

4. The Possiblities

. . . or did your great great grandfather offer to let him board there because he was hoping to find a husband for his Agnes. ;-)

[CBHagman]

5. Well, whatever the circumstances...

...they all saw to it that I'd be here to participate in this group! ;-)

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

6. A couple of interesting things about the census

Part of the 1900 Ford County IL Census was enumerated by a great-great-great uncle of mine. Interestingly enough, he got all the information on every person and recorded it in his neat handwriting--except for one person. His sister-in-law REFUSED to tell him her age! It was the only person in the whole township where information on age was left blank! :rofl:


I always thought my great-grandmother was the child of a fellow named Lane. In fact, her oldest son's middle name was Lane. But when I checked out the 1880 census, I found her and her older brother both had the surname Palmer! And there were no other Palmers on that page or even in that township! I later found, via marriage records, that the woman I thought was their mother married Mr. Lane in 1879, when my grandmother was 5 and her brother 7! So far, NO ONE, even cousins researching the Lane family, knows what was going on-one had vague memories of "something different" about the family, but that's all.

[Cybergata]

7. What a great story. n/t

[dgibby]

8. Just read this post,

and have to share my story with you.

My great grandmother was listed as Susan Pence Brown, a domestic, in the household of Stephen Hancock. They both had children, and she was working as his housekeeper after the death of his first wife(who was my gg aunt).

In the next census, she was still there, but her last name was Franklin, and her children were listed as either Brown or Franklin, his, of course, as Hancock. My grandmother was listed as Florence Franklin.

In the next census, gg grandmother appeared as Susan Pence Hancock, wife of Stephen, and all the children were listed as Hancock.

In trying to unravel the mystery, I checked all the records still available. No marriages for Susan to a Mr.Brown or a Mr. Franklin. No males by either of those names in any of the census reports, no males by those names listed in any of the cemeteries in the area or in surrounding counties.

In addition, I couldn't find Susan's birth family. Several other family trees listed her parents, but I contacted that family's genealogist, who just happened to be Richard Pence, well-known genealogist and pioneer in internet genealogy. Richard confirmed that my Susan was not his Susan, so back to square one. He even did a computer search and was unable to fine her anywhere. By then, I was beginning she was in the witness protection program or something!

Finally was able to hook up with a cousin who had been in contact with a cousin who had at least solved the mystery re: the father(s) of the children. They were all Stephen Hancock's biological children! The cousin was a nephew of my grandmother's, and his mother had told him the real story before she died.

I can't wait to move back home and go through all the courthouse records. Evidently there's some juicy stuff in the criminal records that a friend found for me. No wonder my dad never wanted to talk about his family!

:evilgrin:

[csziggy]

10. I found out that my 73 year old ggg-grandfather married a 21 year old

And had three or four more kids. Some of the previous researchers had found the young Emily living in the household, but thought she might be the wife of a son or grandson. All they had access to were census indices, but the original census page lists her as his wife and the kids as his children.

I then did more research and found that "Emily" must have bee the "Lucy" who married a man of the same name in the appropriate year, located her family and "L. E." as a young girl with her family in the 1860 census, living down the road from my ancestor.

My grandparents were cousins who grew up in the same household - her father died of probably typhus and her mother moved back to Alabama with her surviving children to live with her grandfather. That house was crowded after the Civil War - a widowed daughter, widowed daughter in law, and a son and his wife, all with large families, living with the elderly parents. In his petition to have his rights restored after the Civil War, the old man claimed he was raising fourteen "orphaned" grandchildren and the census seems to verify this.

My grandparents seem to have fallen in love very young, though they did not marry until he was twenty one. They were married for 54 years and had thirteen children, all of whom lived to adulthood.