RLP 152: State Census Records with Alice Childs

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 152 State Census Records with Alice Childs. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (40s):
Let’s go.

Diana (44s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (45s):
Great. I’ve been reading a fun new book by Lisa Wingate about Lost Friends. It’s really interesting. Have you heard of that?

Diana (52s):
I did read that. That’s a great book.

Nicole (56s):
Yeah, really interesting about Louisiana and the lives of some sharecroppers after the Civil War.

Diana (1m 2s):
And it tells all about the young gal who had previously been enslaveed and she’s off trying to find her family that had been sold away and scattered. And this Book of Lost Friends is where people put in advertisements trying to reunite their family. So I thought it was pretty fascinating,

Nicole (1m 19s):
Really brings to mind why African-American research after the civil war so difficult because the families were scattered and the names had changed. And it’s just a very fascinating time in history. Also very sad.

Diana (1m 34s):
It is really sad. It’s been really nice though with DNA coming onboard, to be able to work on reuniting those families and figuring out relationships. And I’m finding that all of my African-American projects that are coming in always have DNA, because that’s the only way you can make the real connections. Or sometimes there are things in the records, but so many times you really need that DNA or the actual evidence to prove these relationships that I’ve been so grateful that we have that new tool. Yes.

Nicole (2m 4s):
So what have you been working on?

Diana (2m 5s):
Well, I just started a new client project and it’s set in Indian territory and Texas, which, you know, is where our family settled. And so it’s fun to get back to kind of my area of most experience, I would say. And it’s been really fun because a lot of the locations are exactly where our family lived. And so as I’m doing the research, I’m thinking, oh, well, there’s that county and there’s that city. And so it’s been fun to see those similar locations. So it’s kind of fun. I always love starting a new project and seeing what I can find. This is a gentlemen that really has no history of where he came from. And he’s in that in-between area of 1880 to 1900.

Diana (2m 45s):
That’s so tricky in that area when they go up into Indian territory because at the records or lack thereof. So anyway, I’m looking forward to using some good methodology to figure it out.

Nicole (2m 58s):
Yeah. It’s tricky when there’s a hole in the records like that.

Diana (3m 1s):
Yes and especially when we are missing that 1890 census, the US Federal census, that really is a problem.

Nicole (3m 8s):
So true. That’s our topic today actually is the census. But before we talk about our topic, let’s do a couple of announcements. So our study group for the fall registration is beginning. So if you’re interested in doing that, make sure you hop onto our website and sign up. And if you also are interested in being a mentor, which we’re calling a peer group leader, now, we would love for you to apply, just go to our website and send in a research report where you’ve incorporated DNA evidence. And we’ll take a look at it. Also be sure to join our newsletter if you haven’t to get updates on our blog posts and our coupons.

Diana (3m 44s):
Well, let’s get to our podcast for the day. Our topic is state censuses, and we have a guest here with us. We have Alice Childs. Hi Alice.

Alice Childs (3m 53s):
Hi there

Diana (3m 54s):
we are so glad to have Alice back with us. She was a guest on a previous podcast. She is also one of our researchers on our Family Locket genealogists team. And she’s fabulous. She’s working on her Mid-Atlantic accreditation, which covers New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey Delaware. And what state am I missing?

Alice Childs (4m 18s):
Maryland,

Diana (4m 18s):
Maryland, poor Maryland. So, you know, for all of you listening, you know that those are some challenging states, I would say, especially New York. And so Alice gets our New York projects, which you’ve done a great job on, let me thank you. Alice also has her own blog, AliceChilds.com. So if you want to go read wonderful articles on so many different things, I think that you are getting the topics for your blog posts, from the topic she needed to study for accreditation. Is that correct?

Alice Childs (4m 47s):
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been working on. Now I’m studying for the level two or three testing. So I’ve just been diving into records and writing blog posts about them is a great way to learn how to navigate the records.

Diana (4m 57s):
It really is. And I found that when I did that in preparation for accreditation and then after as well, just to solidify those different record types, it was so great. And the best part is that you have a resource to go back to so many times we dive in and we learn something and then we just sort of forget because we don’t use it for a while. So it’s really nice to have that resource. Yeah. So today we’re gonna talk all about State Census is taken from your blog post about that, which is fun because we have not talked about the State Census on the podcast. I’m excited to dive into this topic.

Alice Childs (5m 30s):
I’m excited to be here and talk about it. Thanks for having me.

Nicole (5m 33s):
Great. So before I start with our first question, I’m just curious. Why did you choose to write about this topic of State Censuses? Have you found it really useful?

Alice Childs (5m 42s):
I have found State Censuses has to be really useful and it varies from state to state because every state was kind of in charge of their own state censuses. So it’s not really consistent, but the ones that are existing usually were taken in between Census years, so 1855, 65 on the years of alternating with the Federal Census. And so they can be really useful for adding details to those in-between years, which I think is great. I research in New York a lot as Diana said, and I love the New York state censuses. They started in 1825 for some counties, but the earlier ones aren’t available online. So online, we have the 1855 to 1875 censuses.

Alice Childs (6m 24s):
And then again in 1892, which is really great for the 1890 census is lost. So that’s a great substitute for that. And then again from 1905 to 1925, so that’s a great resource for New York research and they provide some really good details just depending on which census that you are looking at. So for example, in 1850 on the Federal Census, it begins listing a person’s state or country of birth, and that’s great information, but the 1855 New York State Census goes one step farther and it lists the county of birth if the person was born in New York state. So all of a sudden now you’re narrowing down to a birth county instead of just a birth state.

Alice Childs (7m 7s):
I found that to be really helpful on a project I did recently, I was researching a subject named Aaron Brownell, and I was trying to find evidence to link him to his potential father, Martin, and Aaron’s obituary stated that he was born in Livingston county, New York, and on the 1855 State Census, I saw Martin living next to a man named Horace Brownell. And they were the right age to be father and son. And Horace’s birthplace was also listed as Livingston county. And so that gave a great clue that the Aaron that was born in Livingston county really could be Martin’s son. So there are some great clues that can come from researching and State Census.

Nicole (7m 44s):
That’s wonderful. I have also been very amazed and happy to see the county of birth in those New York State Census Records, because often we don’t have a lot of information about where within the state a person was born. And so having those State Census here is with that information is extremely helpful when you’re trying to find the origin of a person, you know, their birth parents and narrowing down to looking for people in that one county instead of the whole state.

Alice Childs (8m 14s):
Yeah, it’s so great.

Diana (8m 15s):
Are there some others, other kinds of evidence found in the state censuses besides that county of birth?

Alice Childs (8m 21s):
Yeah, the 1855 New York State Census also gives information that can be really helpful for tracing migration patterns with families. So Martin and Horace Brownell and other records, I have seen them living in the same areas, so they appear to have migrated together. And the 1855 State Census shows that Martin had been at his current residence for one year, then Horace had apparently moved in just a few months after Martin, because it said Martin had lived there for one year and Horace had lived there for about five months. You know, it’s really interesting to be able to trace when an ancestor moved into an area and to see if other family members are moving in at the same time. The 1865 New York State Census doesn’t have the number of years a person’s been a resident of their location, but it has some great information about marital status and children asking how many children a person had and how many times they’d been married.

Alice Childs (9m 14s):
And that’s something that you don’t see until later in Federal censuses. So New York did a great job of putting some really good information on their census records.

Diana (9m 23s):
Absolutely do. And you know, a lot of times we see someone on that say for instance, 1850 Federal Census, and then the 1860 Federal Census, they’re in a new location. And we have no idea when they got there. So these in-between censuses can really help us to narrow that down. And it also just helps us see who is in the household at the time, gives us more information on the family and that information about marital status and children. That is awesome because we don’t see that until 1900 in the Federal Census says, I’m kind of wishing that I was in New York specialist. I’ve done a few New York projects and I have these little State Census, but oh my goodness, they are fun

Alice Childs (10m 2s):
For all of the difficulty in researching New York. This is a treasure for New York researchers.

Diana (10m 8s):
There are so many other challenges.

Nicole (10m 11s):
I don’t know that I’ve used the 1865 census information about marital status and children, but that is so helpful.

Alice Childs (10m 18s):
It really is.

Nicole (10m 20s):
And the number of times a person had been married, it seems like Alice weren’t we recently talking about that on the later, Federal Census, where it says M 1 and M 2.

Alice Childs (10m 29s):
Yes. That was something I recently learned because when you see M 2 you think it’s means a second marriage, but it actually means a second or subsequent marriage. And so knowing what those designations are, is really helpful.

Nicole (10m 42s):
Yeah. It’s really counterintuitive to think that M 2 could mean they’ve been married more than once and not just it’s their second marriage. And that came up in somebody’s research report on the Study Group, the person knew this was a third marriage, but why did it say M 2? So, so how can somebody listening, learn what each part of the census means?

Alice Childs (11m 3s):
There are a lot of great resources. I think the National Archives website has some great information you can go to and learn about census records. Also, I have a book called Researching in the United States, help me out with the title,

Diana (11m 22s):
Al Greewood’s book, The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy right here on my shelf.

Alice Childs (11m 27s):
I’m scrambling to try and find it anyway. There’s some great that’s where that is where the M1 and M2 information came from. So that’s a great resource for all kinds of records for us research too.

Diana (11m 39s):
Yeah, I agree. I read that entire book on a long road trip once when I was preparing for accreditation and I refer to it over and over again, because he has really good examples and it’s written in a way that’s interesting and kind of fun to read, especially if you’re really into genealogy.

Nicole (11m 57s):
That’s what people might think. We’re weird thinking that’s interesting you reading. That just reminds me of the standard and genealogy standards about understanding meanings. And I think a lot of the time we make assumptions about what things mean that we’re seeing in the records, but it’s so good to just have an open mind and have that curiosity of, well, what does this actually mean? I wonder what the census instructions were to the enumerator so that I can understand why they wrote this. And it reminds me of the time when we were talking about that, check mark over the CA and that means Confederate army. And they were checking off how many people might need a pension.

Nicole (12m 38s):
And then another column that’s frequently confused as the naturalization column. Sometimes it will say NA and sometimes it will say P, right for papers, PA, PA. And So I I’ve seen several researchers think that it means different things. You know, just assuming that the NA was actually an NO meaning they’re not naturalized, whereas it actually meant they were naturalized and I was short for naturalized. So, yeah, it’s good to always try to understand the meanings and the why behind what was written on the census, instead of just trying to guess.

Diana (13m 12s):
And sometimes you see a census taker, who’s done something outside of the box, you know, they’ve got some different notations and you cannot figure it out and you really have to go through, maybe you have 20 pages to get a feel for what’s going on. And we had a question either in our Facebook group or the Study Group like that. And they were like, what is going on with this census notation? And when I looked all the way at the beginning and went through the end, I saw that the census taker had made this special little check mark for every person, again in New York who was not born in New York. So it didn’t matter if you were born in Ireland or Scotland or England or Delaware or Georgia, you got this notation.

Diana (13m 53s):
So she was so confused about what that meant for ancestor. And you really had to just go look through the entire census to figure it out, see the pattern,

Nicole (14m 2s):
If you can figure that out. It’s so helpful. Yeah. Often there are things that we can understand, and that’s such a great piece of advice to go through the entire town or the entire county census, and try to figure out what that census taker was doing. It reminds me of what we do when we can’t read handwriting very well. And we have to read that scribes handwriting for several pages to really understand what their letters look like,

Diana (14m 25s):
Right. And reading the entire census of your ancestors village or township gives you such good context for the community. And you can see how wealthy people were. Were they a poor community? What ethnicities were there? So it’s one of my favorite things to do. And I think it’s one of the easier things to do to get a sense of community.

Nicole (14m 45s):
Yeah, that reminds me of an article in the NGSQ that I was reading recently where the author was trying to say that this person is the same as this person, even though their name was different. And one of the things she did was look in the census for all of the people with the same occupation and say, there’s only like 13 people on all of the state that were a Cooper. And so that lends additional evidence to the fact that this person is the same man, even though his name was slightly different because it had been anglicized. So it can be really helpful looking at the census more broadly like that, to understand the community,

Diana (15m 18s):
Right? And you can search by occupation. You can search by all sorts of things. I’ve searched by address in a big city, trying to locate someone. And so, you know, usually we just search by name and the age birthplace, maybe individual relationships. But then if you look down below those main search terms, you can see all these different ones that you can play around with. And think outside the box about how you can use that in your research.

Alice Childs (15m 45s):
Those are such great tips.

Nicole (15m 47s):
Well, getting back to our discussion of State Census Records, I was intrigued by the 1892 New York State Census. So what do you know about that? And I’m so curious why they didn’t just go with every 10 years. You know, they had done 1865, 1875, 1885, and then 1892.

Alice Childs (16m 4s):
I am. I’m not sure why I to look into that a little bit more. That’s a great question. I do know that it’s a little bit different. It doesn’t have the same formatting as the other census records. And it really does just list the name, age, and country of birth and give some information about citizenship, status and occupation. So there are a few things there, but it doesn’t list families. It’s just names kind of like earlier censuses on the Federal Census, but that’s a really helpful one for finding out whether naturalization records might exist for your immigrant ancestor. So it has some great details, but not quite as many as the other State Censuses

Nicole (16m 42s):
Does that one just say the head of household, then?

Alice Childs (16m 45s):
It seems like it has a head of household and then other people listed below with the same last name you would assume are in the household.

Nicole (16m 52s):
Oh, I see what you’re saying. So it doesn’t tell you relationships between the people?

Alice Childs (16m 57s):
no relationships. No,

Nicole (16m 58s):
That’s a loss for sure. But it is better than nothing, especially when we’re missing the 1890 census. Yeah.

Alice Childs (17m 4s):
Yeah. Because you know, like Diana was saying, when there’s a 20 year stretch between records, that makes it really hard to find people, but that just adds a little bit of information for those years.

Diana (17m 13s):
Yeah. I would love to have that for all of my states that I researched.

Nicole (17m 17s):
So what other census years are there besides 1892 in New York,

Alice Childs (17m 22s):
They have the 1875 and then 1905, 1915 and 1925. And those years are similar to the earlier years. You know, they list all the members of a household. They list relationships and county or state of birth and marital and citizenship status. They vary a little bit from one to the other, but they’re very similar in 1915, though, it does state the number of years a person has resided in the United States. So that can be really helpful for finding passenger lists and immigration records. So that one’s really cool. Yeah.

Nicole (17m 54s):
That is cool. Have you found that people usually remember the number of years they have been in the U S or has it been like a range where you’re like, oh, they’re off by five years?

Alice Childs (18m 5s):
The ones I’ve seen they’re fairly accurate. It seems like they do remember pretty well. Sometimes you might have the same problem with any census record in that who is the informant? You know, maybe the informant doesn’t remember. Exactly. So it’s always good to know that anything you find on a census is not set in stone. You do have to do a little research and broaden the years that you’re searching for. If you don’t find what you’re looking for.

Diana (18m 28s):
Well, we always correlate all the information. You know, we search out every single census, every record and we correlate it and try to understand what it’s telling us. So it’s just another source that could be very useful. Well, we have talked a lot about New York censuses. Are there State Censuses for other states? I think our listeners are probably dying to know that

Alice Childs (18m 48s):
Yeah, the other states do have censuses. And like I said, they vary depending on what the state wanted to take a census for, or if they decided to. But the best way to find out whether your state has census records is to go to the United States, census State, Census page on FamilySearch on the research Wiki. And it has a table where you can click on each state and that’ll show you whether state censuses were taken in which years. And even if there weren’t State Census has taken, it tells you what types of censuses were taken. So colonial censuses or territorial censuses before the state became a state, or they point to some Indian census rolls and even things like school censuses I’ve seen on there.

Alice Childs (19m 31s):
So it’s a great place to start to look for your State Census Records.

Diana (19m 35s):
Yeah, it is really a good resource that page. And I’ve been just looking at a few of my states that I typically research and looking at Georgia. I see that there are some online state and territorial censuses. So there’s an 1827, 38, 45, 52, 59 and 96, all those in the 1800s. But it does say select counties. And so, you know, it sounds like it’s not statewide, but that’s really nice that the tables are there and they explain exactly what is available. So thank you for pointing us to that great resource. Then I would just say that anyone doing locality guides as you’re researching your ancestors, you’ll want to make sure you have a section in your census section on state censuses, and you can link straight to that page and do a little writeup about exactly what’s available for your area.

Alice Childs (20m 31s):
That’s such a great idea.

Nicole (20m 33s):
I was looking at the table and the research Wiki as well, and I clicked on Alabama. And this page is really helpful. You know, it talks about first what’s available for our population schedules for the Federal Census. And then it goes down to the state and territorial census, and I’ve actually used the 1866 Alabama State Census. Recently this last week, I was talking to a person who is probably related to us on our Welch line. And she had a question about, you know, there’s two people named George Welch and how can we tell who’s who? And I was using the State Census as one of the pieces of evidence to differentiate the two men, because like the 1892 New York State Census, it doesn’t say family members.

Nicole (21m 17s):
And in fact, it’s just the head of households kind of like a pre-1850 census. And so it says his name, George Welch, and then the fact that there’s some one male over 20 and one female over 20. So we don’t really know that much, but what you can see is who he lived next to, and he’s living next to Nancy Welch and a few households above that as George Reynolds, which one of the George Welch’s was the son of Nancy Reynolds Welch. So this census in 1866 was really helpful in figuring out that one George Welch stayed in Alabama and the other one went to Texas. And so we could kind of figure out who was, who that way,

Diana (21m 55s):
That’s fun that you were using the Alabama state censuses. Cause then my previous project, I did the same thing. And here was a really interesting thing that I discovered Alabama did its own census in 1850. So you have a State Census for Alabama, and then you have the Federal Census. The State Census was taken earlier in the year. So my research subject appeared in a certain county earlier in the year. And then for the Federal Census, which was not done in that county till I think December, he was no longer there. So it was really fun to use that as some evidence of, of a possible move. And it was interesting just to compare for the exact same year, how different things could be in the area State Census is can really open up a lot of your research and give you some new clues.

Diana (22m 43s):
So thanks so much Alice for writing this great blog post we’ll link to that in the show notes and for coming on and talking with us about state censuses.

Nicole (22m 52s):
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I think there’s such a great resource, so I hope everybody can start utilizing them in their research. Absolutely. And next week, we’ll talk with Alice again and we will go over some more censuses next time. It’ll be about non population’s schedules. So we look forward to that.

Diana (23m 10s):
All right. Well, have a great week everyone. And thanks again, Alice.

Alice Childs (23m 14s):
Thank you.

Nicole (23m 15s):
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