Secrets of the Census: Part 4 (1870)

From 1861 through the spring of 1865, the United States was at war with itself. By the time the Civil War ended, the nation had been torn apart; there were, by current estimates, about 700,000 or possibly more, left dead by the war, whether in combat or illness. One of the ways used to calculate that death toll was by comparing the number of men who were enumerated in 1860 to the number who were counted ten years later, in the federal census of 1870. Lots more information on this census follows.

What makes the 1870 census unique is that it is the first to list formerly enslaved people by their complete names. This census also called for dwellings to be numbered in the order the enumerator visited them, for families to similarly be numbered, and for a listing of everyone who was residing in the home as of 1 June, no matter how young or old. 

Many of the other questions on this census are similar to the previous one with a few exceptions. 

• This is the first census to ask if parents, both mother and father, were “of foreign birth.” Although just a check mark, it’s a clue to identifying immigrant ancestors.
• This census also asked the enumerator to indicate a month for babies born within the year or couples married within the year, providing clues to locating appropriate records.
• Enumerators had specific codes to use for a person’s “color” on this census: W for White; B for Black; M for Mulatto (biracial); C for Chinese, and I for Indian. Although sometimes errors were made, these may be helpful for learning more about your family’s ethnic origins.

After the Civil War, people moved: from devastation to freedom, to new job opportunities, or to head west to explore new territory. Southerners whose lives had been disrupted migrated to large northern cities or to more open areas of farmland. If you had families in 1860 who have disappeared in the 1870 census, first look for them in other locations. If they had young men in them, look for widows and children perhaps moving back with other relatives. Pay attention to that column at the far right of the census form that asks for disabilities, as it may reveal a veteran who sustained an injury leaving him blind or deaf or possibly with PTSD, which, at the time, might be construed as “idiotic” or insane.

Here are two examples of what you might find as you look more closely at the 1870 census for your family. The first is part of a page from Monmouth, Warren County, Illinois, which is in the northwest part of the state, about seventy miles west of Peoria and about thirty miles east of Burlington, Iowa, which sits on the Mississippi River. It’s a farming community and home to Monmouth College, a small school founded in 1853, which, according to a college journal published in 1911, saw almost every male on campus, a total of 232, leave for the Civil War, and more than one-fourth of them were injured. One in eight was killed. When you look at the census below, it is easy to understand why just one piece of one page of the county’s enumeration shows four young widows with children among the educators and farmers. Also note in the upper right, that George and Mary Bemker, both twenty-one, were married in June and infant George E. was born in May. If this were your family, you might want to clarify the timeline here; presumably, the marriage was in June 1869 and baby George born in May 1870, but maybe not. Note, also, that Camelia Bigham, the second of the widows, and her two small children are listed as Mulatto, perhaps leading to further investigation of their origins.

If we travel to Yazoo City, Mississippi, we get an interesting picture of life in a southern city after the war. We see White and Black people living side by side. Surprisingly, on this sheet, births cover a wide swath of locations, not just Mississippi. We can see Louisiana, Alabama, Virginia, New York, Tennessee, Missouri, and North Carolina, as well as Hanover, Prussia, and further down the page, a woman from Scotland. Columns 11 and 12 show father and mother, if foreign-born, so you can determine where and maybe even when these families arrived in the U.S. Notice that six-year-old C. J. Agnew is listed as “deaf and dumb.” Further down the page, H. C. Phipps, a store clerk, and his wife M. A. were married in March. Mr. Phipps had real estate worth $2,500, so they were off to a good start in their marriage. Continuing down, we find H. S. Burns, a thirty-five-year-old Black laborer, and his teenage wife, Ella, who is Mulatto, were married in July. The last date we can see on this part of the sheet is the birth of T. D. Pugh, a three-month-old boy born in March, whose occupation is “at home.”

We still don’t know how the people in a household are related to each other, although we can make assumptions. But we need to be careful because sometimes those relationships are not what we think. Our next census will take us forward ten years and help us put our families together a lot easier. Stay tuned for our look at the 1880 census, coming soon.