Census Records
Census Sometimes Little Help Tracking Migrations
I put my census form in the mail a little after the first of the month. I also scanned it, and I’m making some family group sheets to go with photographs. All these items together will constitute our family’s census 2010 documentation. Seventy-two years from now, family researchers may conclude that I have lived in the same county for an …
April 11, 2010 Sunday at 10:40 pm
Census Collection Free on Footnote.com through April
This note came from Justin Schroepfer, marketing director at Footnote.com: I wanted to update you that we have decided to extend our Interactive Census Collection free to the public through the end of April. Since opening this collection a few weeks ago, we have received a very positive response. In order to view the images from the collection, visitors only …
April 10, 2010 Saturday at 8:23 pm
The New Decade Arrives
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 got no idea, but bring …
January 4, 2010 Monday at 6:58 pm
Halloween Census Whacking
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 hunting for Vampires, Zombies, Ghosts, …
October 31, 2009 Saturday at 6:24 pm
BREAKING NEWS: Entire Census Going on Footnote.com
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 press release from its Lindon, …
October 29, 2009 Thursday at 3:00 am
John Wesley Bowie was born . . . where??
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 Facebook genealogy crowd and others. These items …
September 22, 2009 Tuesday at 4:35 pm
Reading the Writing on the Brick Wall
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 the issue into genealogical …
May 29, 2009 Friday at 6:00 pm
Another Approach to Finding African-American Names in the Census
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 another way. On Ancestry.com, …
March 24, 2009 Tuesday at 4:09 pm
Sticks And Stones, There’s N—’s Living with the Bones!
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 combined with othe records could resolve …
June 14, 2008 Saturday at 1:49 am
Research Tip: Slaves and Slavs in the U.S. Census (and how to tell the difference!)
“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 by name in the …
June 14, 2008 Saturday at 1:05 am
