Family History Tips--Part 11

Census Record Mistakes and Anomalies

by Brenna Corbit, Technical Services Librarian

We have already looked at various issues of faulty indexing of primary sources. But in many cases, the problem lies with the record itself. Census records, in particular, may have several types of faults.

Census taking was not as easy as today, which consists of a mailed form to be filled out and returned. The 2020 numeration will most likely have an electronic filing option. Early census takers lugged a large book of blank forms from door to door. We already examined the issues of language barriers, spelling errors, and illegible handwriting associated with these records, but there were other issues that happened in that door-to-door method.

Sometimes no one answered the door, resulting in several outcomes. Ask the next-door neighbors, which can explain the misinformation of names, ages or places of birth. Or sometimes the census taker made a note that a residence was unoccupied, causing the enumerator to return at a later date. These last entries will show up on the last page of the enumeration. 

1920 census enumerator—www.census.gov

In some cases, a person refused to answer the door, such as with my Polish great grandfather. “Pop didn’t answer the door to anyone who didn’t speak Polish,” my great uncle once said. But sometimes a household is simply forgotten. If so, annual city directories are an alternative for locating a residence. Many city directories have been digitized on Ancestry and other websites.

In some cases, an individual or a family may be on the move the same day the enumerator appeared to record a locality, resulting in a complete miss. Again, a city directory may locate a person. In some rare cases, people show up in two places. Enumerations often took place over several months in the year. Therefore, a person recorded in one location, may be recorded again at a later date. An example of this occurred in my family. My great grandfather’s brother shows up in prison on 18 April 1910, and then at home with his mother on 25 April 1910. Either he was released between the 18th and 25th of April, or his mother simply included him because that was his residence  prior to his incarceration.

Recently, I have noticed jumbled residences in census records, of which I have no explanation for the cause. In one case, a family was split on two different pages, as if the parents and children were living apart from each other. But a close examination of the street and house number of both records indicated they were in the same household. In a similar case, it first appeared that my great aunt lived with a mystery-man. Always carefully examine every column in the census forms.

Another easily rectified problem occurs when a household extends to the next census page. In one case, Emanuel Riffert and his wife Elizabeth appear in the last two lines, and their son Andrew appears on the next page. The indexer of this census simply forgot to turn the page to include the son.

While not the enumerator’s fault, you may have to search the census images without the aid of an index due to indexing errors. If you know the address in which a person lived, you can search that enumeration district. Use the website aid, Unified Census ED Finder to locate a district.

In some cases, especially in sparsely populated places such as the western states, enumerators falsely recorded population counts to gain voting districts or statehood. Some families would be repeated in other areas, or some families would be pure fabrication (1).

(1) Szucs, Loretto Dennis and Matthew Wright, Finding Answers in U.S. Census Records, Orem, UT, Ancestry Publishing, 2001.