Stupid Damned Fire

I have resumed working on my family history. It's really quite interesting (not my family - the process), but it can also be very frustrating.

While I have been able to trace my maternal grandmother's family back to 1510 (including two many-greats grandmothers named Elizabeth Warren - woo hoo!), I am stuck on the other three grandparents because of the lack of census data from 1890. That's the stupid damned fire in the thread title. It just happens that I cannot connect any of them to their parents because I must have 1890 data. Bummer. I guess I could call someone ... no, wait ... there are no surviving members of my family in generations earlier than mine. Good God, I am old.

If you have even one drop of African blood you're "colored."

My mother traced our ancestry back to pilgrim times, but I can't say it held much interest for me. Buncha old dead people. Nobody famous or even particularly accomplished. I assume that's pretty normal.

We all have "African blood" in us if you go back far enough. Hell, I've got Neanderthal blood in me (most of us do).

I find it interesting that at least one branch of my family has been in the country for so long - a few years before the pilgrims

One ancestor was given a great deal of land in the Carolinas by King George for his service in the fourth of the French and Indian wars. Later, he died while in British custody during the revolution. His son spent four years in the continental army, ending his service as an NCO under Francis Marion.

My mother's family has lived in the south since landing here. I found great-grandfathers and their siblings who served in the Confederate army, and a few who had owned slaves. In fact, in direct descent in my mother's family, I am the first person I've found since 1640 who was not born in the south.

Some things just make me grin. My father's mother was a real stick-up-her-ass Baptist. Found out she was only sixteen when she got married. And that's the youngest bride I have run across. My mother's mother was a real sweetheart, a nurse and very proper. She was six months pregnant with my mother when she got married to a cowboy in Texas.

And I have to wonder what people such as Sir Thomas of Ruddington Walker were like.

Your mother may not have found anyone of note in your direct antecedents, but if you were to flesh out the family with all the cousins of every type, there's little doubt that nearly everyone can find a notable person. I'm not bothering with that, just looking at my direct ancestors.

If you've got Neanderthal blood in you, your wife has Neanderthal sperm in her.

You're just a dirty old man, aren't you?

A cousin, whom I haven't seen in at least sixty years, sent me a spreadsheet with data for the ancestry of our common grandmother. It goes back to 1402 in South Wales. I've been trying to verify the data (he did say that it might be a bit rough) and once again find myself stuck - in one god damned relationship - with the lack of an 1890 census. Shit!

What's lost is lost, you're not getting it back. Given that the 1890 census is not available, what other resources can you find? Any Civil War records, which was pretty heavily documented, from 1865? Can you compare 1880's census to 1900's, and extrapolate? Are there city/county/State records from 1890?

NoCoPilot wrote:

What's lost is lost, you're not getting it back.

Damn. I thought if I just griped enough, it would magically appear. Thanks for clarifying that for me.

Records from the Civil War era are of no use in tracking someone born in 1882. Duh. But I have used records from that era and from the Revolution era in tracing another family line.

What the problem is in this case: A grandfather was born in 1882 in Illinois. In the 1900 census, I found him living in a boarding house in Missouri (I'm fairly certain it's him).   His parents are who I'm looking for. There are no birth records available and the only census which would show him living with his parents is the 1890 census. Illinois did not conduct a state census after 1865.

I got myself tied up in the family tree business again for the past couple of days. How incredibly frustrating it can be. When you get back much over a hundred years, the census forms get odd and inconsistent. They are all handwritten: some of the writing is almost illegible, while some is absolutely beautiful.

There are so many errors in the forms, some of them obviously from the family members giving the info, and some from census takers who either had hearing problems are drank early in the day.

I am learning how to identify many of those errors. For example, on one census form a child's name was given as Napoleon B., while on another it was Depolia B.. Because I was able to identify the family group, I realized that the name change was just a "typo." It's also quite common for an individual's age, year of birth, or place of birth to vary from one form to another. People didn't seem to have the same concern for such things back then. "How old is your husband?" "Oh he's about forty, I think." "And where was he born?" "Uh. Tennessee. No, North Carolina; maybe Georgia."

I really think that someone back then was the first to embrace the word: "Whatever."

Yes, and spelling was a lot more flexible in the 1600s-1800s. It's almost as if there was no consensus.

Fortunately, the census takers had to write only persons' and states' names. Occasionally an occupation, but just about everyone agreed on how to spell "farmer."

It's interesting to note how the amount and type of data collected changed over the years. By the time the last publicized census was taken in 1940, there were 34 columns of information for each person in the household. In the first census in 1790, it really was just a count of people: only the head of the household was named, and there were six columns of data:

• Names of Heads of Families.
  Free white Males of 16 years and upwards.
  Free white Males, under 16 years.
  Free white Females.
  All other free Persons.
  Slaves.
  

In the 1850 census, there was a column to check for each person

Quote :

Whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, pauper, or convict.

I can see now why Michele Bachmann was opposed to filling out the census form - it could have been embarrassing.

The 1900 census had a column headed [their caps]

Quote :

OCCUPATION, TRADE, OR PROFESSION
of each person TEN YEARS of age and over.

Many of the early censuses (censi?) noted whether a person could read, write, or speak English. They asked if the person had gone to school, and for how many months. Not years, just months.

And don't forget, slaves counted as 3/5th of a person.

The text of the measure called for counting "three fifths of all other persons."

Must have made it difficult for Southerners, as I'm sure few of them could count to three, much less calculate fractions.