Secrets of the Census, Part 6: 1900

Our last post in this series was in January when we reminded our readers of what happened to the 1890 census and why we don't have digital copies of it for most of our ancestors. (Did you miss that post? You can read it here.) We now come to the start of a new century and a world that was in the throes of major changes. It was the year The Wizard of Oz was published, work began on the subway system in New York City, and those new-fangled automobiles scaring horses and humans were labeled "devil wagons." Hawaii became a U.S. territory, McKinley was president, and a new baseball club, the American League, was formed in Chicago. The census takers for the 1900 federal census began their jobs on 1 June and were given just thirty days to complete their tasks, no small feat for a U.S. population that exceeded 76,000.000! This first twentieth-century census gives us new and important information on our ancestors.

Special Features of the 1900 Census

• This is the only census that asked for both month and year of birth of every person in a household.
• It is also the only census that asked how many years a couple had been married.
• It asked for the number of children born to the mother and how many were still living.
• It was also the first to ask about the length of time an immigrant had been in the U.S. and whether the immigrant was naturalized.
• It included questions on home ownership: whether a home or farm was owned or rented, and if the property was owned, was there a mortgage.

Let's take a look . . .

Frederick Edgar, his wife and five children lived in Brooklyn, New York, in 1900. He was a naturalized citizen, having come from England, where both his parents were born. His wife Annie had been born in Ohio, and their children's birth reflects what seems to be an unusual migration pattern from Ohio to Kentucky and then to New York. Frederick and Annie had been married thirteen years; they'd had five children and all of them were still alive. 

How do we know these things, and what questions do we need to be asking ourselves as we look at this census?

1900 federal census, Brooklyn, New York, Ward 28, population schedule, ED 529, p. 16A, dwelling 152, family 362, Frederick Edgar, imaged "1900 United States Federal Census," Ancestry (www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7602/ : accessed 8 May 2026).

The family lived in an apartment building on Hancock Street. We know this because the street name is written vertically along the far-left side of the census sheet. You can see part of it more clearly in the first image below. 

Of most interest to us in this snippet is the information after each person's name. Here you can see the month and year of their births as well as their ages. While these are not always accurate, they are a starting point for searching for exact birthdates. The columns at the far-right show us the years Fred and Annie had been married, the number of children they'd had, and the number surviving, which, luckily for this family, is all of them.

Continuing across the complete page (but not enlarged) we learn that Frederick and his parents were born in England. Annie and her parents were from Ohio. Also not enlarged, but pertaining to the children, we can see that their firstborn, George, age eleven, was born in Kentucky, and the rest of the children were all born in New York. 

In the enlarged portion below, from the right side of the page, we learn that Frederick arrived in the U.S. in 1885. He'd been in the country about eighteen years, and he was naturalized. He was a printer; he'd not been unemployed (The "0" tells us that.), and they were renting (the "R") a home (not a farm as indicated by the "H.")

We've learned a great deal about this family through just this one census, and we now have several items we would want to follow up on.

1. Where did Frederick immigrate from in England and where in the U.S. did he arrive?
2. Where did Annie and Frederick meet and marry?
3. Why and where was George born in Kentucky?
4. How did they come to be in Brooklyn, New York?

If you haven't analyzed your 1900 census records carefully, this might be a great time to look at them again to see what hints about your own family you may discover!

And, if you are curious . . .

The reason for the weird migration pattern is that Frederick's family migrated from Carlisle, in what was then Cumberland Co., England, to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, about 1869. He and Annie were married in Hamilton Co., Ohio, in 1887, and even though the census says George was born in Kentucky, his birth is listed in the Hamilton County birth register on 9 September 1888. He was born in Cincinnati, which is on the Ohio River, a very short distance from Kentucky, so this is a good example of close, but not quite! When and why the family moved to Brooklyn is a question still to be answered.