I got the Bad Census Index Blues

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 18 Apr 2008 07:17

I have records that place a certain family at a particular address in 1919 and 1925. You'd think that maybe they'd be at that address in the 1920 Census, right?

But no -- I can't find them.

I tried searching on the husband's first name only.
I tried searching on the wife's first name only.

It's a second marriage for both, so there aren't any children that I know of.

I tried searching by age and birthplace.

I tried searching for neighbors.

Nothing doing.

So now I am doing the tedious walk-the-district method.

I am lucky to have access to a City Directory for 1916. My target family is not in the directory at that address, but maybe some of the families in the 1916 list will be in the census.

So I search. I find the street. And I see a familiar pattern of names.

And then I realize: These are the odd numbers. I need the even numbers. I am on the wrong side of the street.

It's like the child's game:

You're getting warmer ....

You're getting colder ....

Aarrrrgh.

Jan

ID:2861

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 18 Apr 2008 08:45

I don't know about your part of the world, but here it's very common for streets to have been renumbered.

Do let us know if you find them!

(It wouldn't be half so much fun if it was easy)

Post by **NickWalker** » 18 Apr 2008 08:59

There are also a number of people who just don't get recorded on a particular census for whatever reason.

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 18 Apr 2008 16:40

Nick, I know they may not have been recorded -- but until I look, how will I that's the case, vs. some insanely bad transcription / OCR? I do see how, in a multi-family building, it would be easy to miss a family.

And Chris -- the fun thing that happened to me elsewhere in this town is that one of the streets I was looking for was re-named. We did a search on Google for an address on a modern map and came up empty. Once we got a map from the period, it was easy to see what had happened.

And after that, I discovered you can look up street-name-changes on Steve Morse's One Step Web Pages:

http://www.stevemorse.org

At any rate, that's why I was using the City Directory, which has 'street guides' listing the heads of household in street number order, as a cross-check. If the street had been re-numbered, and enough families had not moved between 1915 and 1920, it would be possible work out what the change had been.

I bailed out at 1:30 AM -- waiting for one page to load on dial-up is not so bad, but doing it several times over ... very time consuming.

Jan

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 18 Apr 2008 19:00

I am very impressed you have the patience to view census images on dial up, I get fed up waiting for email on dial up, I suppose it's having 8Mb broadband at home thats spoiled dialup for me. Good luck in your search.

Just think about us poor UK people who can't access the 1911 yet, let alone the 1921. [cry]

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 19 Apr 2008 04:27

Jane said:
Just think about us poor UK people who can't access the 1911 yet, let alone the 1921.

Well, I'm in the same boat there, you know. I need the 1911 UK Census as well, to find my husband's family that came back to England in 1904. So I do think about how lucky I am to have 1910, 1920, and 1930 Censuses for this side of the pond.

Jan

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 19 Apr 2008 08:11

If you are browsing census images when you should be in bed, and you are falling asleep at the keyboard, the pages don't seem to take any time at all to load.

You see one start to load, you doze off, you wake up again, and the page is all loaded. Voila. Problem solved. [wink]

Oh, and if you ever need the US Census, be sure to watch out for little scribbled notes in the margins that direct you to other pages. People got left out when the records were copied over and there are often supplemental pages at the end listing the 'strays', with notes about what page and family number / line they belong to.

My husband's maternal grandmother is on one of those oddball sheets. Good thing I saw the note -- Ancestry's doofus OCR placed her as the child of the stray family that happened to be immediately above her. What a mess that was.

Jan

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 19 Apr 2008 08:29

Did I mention that the street is a boundary between two EDs?

The first ED had the street in it, but the sheets I checked had odd numbers. So I decided to try the ED next door, in case the even numbers were there.

I found the right street and found some even numbers, but not the range of even numbers I needed.

Jan

KSS · Post by **KSS** » 19 Apr 2008 18:44

Jane,
Perhaps it's worth mentioning that, although the 1911 census isn't accessible on-line, it is possible to get information about an address by requesting it from the National Archives. It costs £45 for each request, ie, each address. Application form :
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/1911 ... y_add.aspx

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 20 Apr 2008 00:20

Yes, that's a very useful link!

Unfortunately I don't have addresses for any of the relatives on the UK side, after they went back to England. So I'll have to wait until the general release of the 1911 Census to look for my husband's folks.

Jan

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 20 Apr 2008 00:37

Perhaps this will be useful to someone else as a 'case study', so I'll post a bit more about the problem.

The building was a multi-family structure.

1) a check at the USPS web site shows that the address is currently non-deliverable. This sometimes happens when an address is incomplete (e.g. for an apartment building where one does not have the apartment number)

2) the property tax records doesn't show it as a valid address, either. I suspect that the building has been torn down, and the parcel of land on which the building once stood is part of another, larger parcel with a different address elsewhere on the street. (There are several parcels on the street which have the street name but no street number.)

I looked on Google and did the satellite image and I don't see an apartment building at that corner.

If the building still existed, the tax records might have given me some idea of how large the building was, and I might have been able to tell from the USPS site how many apartments were in it. But no go.

So my next step is to compare the City Directories I have access to. I'll see how many heads-of-households there are for that address in each available year.

Then I'll go back to the census records and try again.

Another idea is to try and find the building in the 1930 Census and see if it is still there, and who is living there.

Armed with that information, I may be able to find some more search ideas.

At the moment, though, it seems that the 1920 Census copy I have access to on Ancestry skipped half of the building. Unless there's a supplemental page somewhere, I don't think I'm going to turn them up.

I know in some cases, both a State copy and a Federal Copy of the census exists, but I don't know if this is one of those years. If it is, I may have to go to the Massachusetts State Archives or some similar venue to examine the State copy to see if they were skipped when the State copy was made.

As I said before, the situation is also complicated because the street is a boundary between two EDs. I should also check to see if it is the boundary between the city Wards as well. I know what Ward they are supposed to be in, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have been recorded in the wrong Ward and the Wrong ED. I've already found one record for another family where all I have is the page which was crossed out because the people on it were recorded elsewhere (I can't find the page on which they were recorded 'properly').

More later if I find anything interesting.

Jan

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 20 Apr 2008 01:41

Just for fun, I decided to search the address I had in 1900 to see what is there.

That address is also undeliverable, and now appears to be a parking lot. The commercial building next door was built in 1935.

Checking out the 1930 address next.

Now this is interesting. The building at the 1930 address is a bungalow built in 1922.

I had wondered if the address I had from the 1925 passenger list was simply an old address (that is, the passenger didn't have the family's current address when he bought his ticket), but it doesn't seem likely that the target family moved in 1919 to the address they would be living in 1930, if the building wasn't there until 1922. It's more likely that they moved there sometime after 1922, isn't it?

Jan

philjo · Post by **philjo** » 20 Apr 2008 19:48

Jan,

Are there any electoral registers for that street you could consult for the period around 1920 ?

Jeremy

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 20 Apr 2008 21:03

That's a good question! I'll look for that, but I'm hampered by being all the way across the country from the town I'm researching, so at the moment I'm only working with what might be online.

I did have a look at the (modern-day) property tax records this morning, and discovered that the apartment buildings I've been looking for in the census no longer exist.

On that block, there is an auto repair shop, built in 1900 -- another car-related business is listed at the same address in the 1916 City Directory -- but all the other buildings that were on that side of the street at the first part of the century are gone. The other parcels are all vacant lots.

It is an industrial town, and many of the immigrants came to work in the mills. Any of you who have studied industrial areas know what it means for people to live in 'company housing'.

People are packed in like sardines, and one of the journal articles I've found about housing at the early part of the 20th century suggests that the living conditions were pretty bad.

Jan

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