“Where did you find all that
information?” my dear friend Dave asked. “How do you know all that about my
family?”
Well,
I told him, it’s all right there in the census. Dave has been researching his
family for a few years and has amassed a nice Ancestry.com database full of
juicy tidbits, but he had never heard of extracting a census quite the way I do
it. (I will be providing examples in upcoming posts, starting with my dad and
mom in 1940 and 1930.)
I
think that using the United States census to create a framework of your
family—or skeleton or scaffold or building block, whatever your metaphor of choice is—is an invaluable tool. I use
Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org to locate a particular family group and then
zoom in on the census to find more details. I think the census is more
important in the beginning than vital records. I know, I know: heresy! But the
census helps me to put family groups together in a way that a random collection
of BMDs does not. Now I am cognizant of the fact that just because a group of people lived together in a specific household,
it does not mean that they were related. But it’s a start, a pretty good jumping off point.
I
have used various tools to extract the census information. Chicken-scratchings
on scraps of paper, forms provided by my local genealogy library in which I
handwrite the details, spreadsheets from CensusTools.com (one of the best deals
in genealogy-dom). I’d really like to check out the database program Clooz which looks promising—Version 4 was supposed to be out at the end of 2018, so
I’ll wait for that. But my favorite method remains the one that I have created
which makes it so easy to read and understand the data without squinting or
tracking my eye across a number of columns. (I just turned 58 and my peepers
are fading fast.) It makes the information almost like a story, and I do like
my stories. I’m looking forward in my next post to getting into the meat of my
genealogy research!
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Coming Up Next: The 1970-2020 Census
Predictor for Christine Jane UNDERWOOD
Coming Up Soon: Ahnentafel #2:
Introducing My Father, Stephen Alexander UNDERWOOD, Jr.