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.

StLGS To Host Trivia Night Once Again! Registration is Now Open!

It feels so long ago, but it's been only a few years since the world shut down for the COVID pandemic. Those of us at St. Louis Genealogical Society have a vivid memory of how life changed because our last Trivia Night was the evening before everything came to a standstill. It was Saturday, 7 March 2020, and we were enjoying a festive evening at the Richmond Heights Community Center, not knowing that it would be our last for the foreseeable future. And now, fabulous news! We are ready to host a Trivia Night once again. Please read on for all the details!

Secrets of the Census, Part 5: 1880

The 1880 federal census is a turning point for family historians because, at last, we can see how people living together are related to the head of the household. Prior to this, we could only make assumptions, and too often we might be wrong! This census included questions we've seen on prior censuses, but it did not ask for value of real estate or property.

Secrets of the Census, Part 2

The first federal census to list all members of a household appeared in 1850, but that's not the only thing that makes this enumeration so important to genealogists. This census also asked for the birthplace of each individual, and even though they didn't always do it, enumerators in this census were to read the information they recorded back to the interviewee so errors could be corrected, adding to its accuracy. This census, and the one following it, also included Slave Schedules for southern states (although New Jersey and the District of Columbia also participated). As we mentioned in our previous post about the early censuses, there were non-population schedules during the mid-nineteenth century, and in 1850, these schedules were created for agriculture, industry and manufacturing, mortality, social statistics, and veterans. Read on for much more on this census.

Secrets of the Census, Part 1

American genealogists take for granted that we have access to our census records. We understand there are privacy limits that keep us from seeing more recent censuses, but we also enjoy almost unlimited access to all of them from the first in 1790 to the most recently released, 1950. Yes, we know that some early censuses are missing, and most of us have heard the sad story about the loss of nearly all of the 1890 census due to the effects of a fire. Those of us who remember the days of cranking microfilm or plowing through Soundex cards are luxuriating in having the census enumerations digitized and forgiving of spelling mistakes in the online indexes. We now can breeze through dozens of pages, building our families with comparative ease. But, in our eagerness to collect census information, do we spend enough time really looking at what is on all those forms? We'll take a closer look at the secrets of the census in the next few weeks, beginning with the earliest and working our way forward in time.

If Only Geographic Borders Didn't Change!

It certainly makes it easier to do genealogy if your family lived in the same place for hundreds of years, doesn’t it? Well, maybe. The reality is that over time, borders are always changing. As America became more settled by non-native people, the borders of cities, counties, colonies, and then states were forever shifting. In Europe, centuries of disputes over who ruled what and where meant that stability was the exception and not the norm. What do movable boundaries mean for those of us trying to research our families?