So it seems it was just October and here it is January 2010! Last year I didn’t really set particular goals for genealogy in 2009, yet I came up with a major breakthrough–finding the parents of my great-grandfather, Richard William Gines (a meeting some cousins on that journey). So what will happeb in 2010? I’ve [...]
With the crisis of my father’s recent illness and the minor drama of my own, I feel like I’ve been way out of touch the last two weeks. It’s time get back into the flow of things. I thought little census whacking for Halloween would ease my way back into writing. So I went [...]
At this hour, Footnote.com is releasing details of its venture with the National Archives to digitize and make a searchable database of the entire set of available U.S. census population schedules from 1780 to 1930. Footnote.com presently has the complete 1860 census and about 97% of the 1930 census available on its site. In a [...]
Continue reading about BREAKING NEWS: Entire Census Going on Footnote.com
Sunday Monday Tuesday Afternoon Take on Saturday Night Genealogical Fun: John Wesley Bowie
(Yeah, it took awhile to get this together!)
Randy Seaver at Genea-musings has made a relatively regular item a feature called “Saturday Night Genealogical Fun.” It usually involves some quiz or meme or game and is highly popular with the [...]
Continue reading about John Wesley Bowie was born . . . where??
I had intended to move on today and discuss the plantations that we’ve come across in our long way around the brick wall of my great-grandfather, Richard William Gines. But I want to share an issue that has hindered our search and is not all that uncommon. The Wordle graphic above tells the story!
To put [...]
Continue reading about Reading the Writing on the Brick Wall
Last year I wrote an article called “Slaves and Slavs in the U.S. Census (and how to tell the difference!).”
You can find the post here: http://geneablogie.blogspot.com/2008/06/research-tip-slaves-and-slavs-in-us.html. It describes how to find African-Americans by name in the census prior to 1870. Since writing that last year, I’ve continued to experiment with the topic and have discovered [...]
Continue reading about Another Approach to Finding African-American Names in the Census
The role of the historian is to report things as they were found, not as the historian or the rest of modernity wish they had been. In the last post, we discussed using racial descriptions as names to search for African-Americans. We were successful using “slave,” “colored,” and “Negro” to find records that if [...]
Continue reading about Sticks And Stones, There’s N—’s Living with the Bones!
“No census taken between 1790 and 1860 contains even one slave’s name.”
Harriet C. Frazier, Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those Who Helped Them, 1763-1865, (McFarland & Company: 2004), p. 12.
Most genealogists will not find this statement particularly surprising. We all know that, except for a very few free blacks, African-Americans were not enumerated [...]
Some Lessons about Census Records
Contestant #1: My name is Julia McDavid. I was born in the nineteenth century and had a daughter named Helen. Can you find me in the 1880 or 1900 census?
Contestant #2: My name is Julia McDavid. I was born in the nineteenth century and had a daughter named Helen. [...]
