Family History Tips-Part 29

Finding Information in the Other Census Records

by Brenna Corbit, Technical Services Librarian

Currently, I am working on a confusing family line of the name Freligh that bounced back and forth between New York City, Brooklyn, Connecticut, and northern New Jersey during the late 1800s. I say confusing because, father like son, they are in and out of marriages, saying they are widowed when in fact divorced, and then sometimes kissing and making up. Yes, the Frelighs are a challenge when trying to figure out this mess in the census records.

In these Family History Tips articles, I often refer to the U.S. Decennial Census records as a main building-block for family histories because they present an every-ten-year snapshot of a family. However, family has short-lived marriages that sometime appear only between censuses. However, since this is primarily a New York/New Jersey family, I am in luck. 

Besides the national census records, many states had other censuses taken between the decennial years, usually at the halfway point, such as 1905, 1915, and 1925. They are not always as detailed as the decennial records, but they do help when trying to determine what happened between 1900 and 1910, for example.

They are also extremely valuable as a substitute for the U.S. Decennial Census of 1890 which was mostly destroyed in a fire. That 20-year gap between 1880 and 1900 is brutal to family researchers. If your ancestor was born in 1881, that person may be married and not living with their family of origin by 1900, which makes it difficult to make connections in family structures. 

Many states had censuses taken around 1885 and 1895, which helps fill that gap. I wish this were true for Pennsylvania. My great-grandmother Ida Mae born 1889 in Dauphin County, Pa. was adopted by a Riffert family. Her birth name was Thompson, according to child custody court records. If there were no fire or a mid-decade state census taken, I may not be hitting a brick wall with my head trying to figure out whose daughter she was. These records are valuable, too, in case a family was missed in a decennial census.

The U.S. government census website has a complete listing of these state censuses. Ancestry and FamilySearch have some of these records available. Unfortunately, there are no known or surviving state census records for Connecticut, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and West Virginia. Most are in indexed digital format, but a few are crummy transcribed indexes, only. Transcribed sources can often contain errors. It is always best to have access to the original whether digital or actual. 

If so, such as Ancestry not having the images, try finding them in Familysearch—remember, the site is free with a registration. Also, avoid a federated search for these records from the main search function on the homepages. My experience with federated searches shows that they often miss some valuable resources. Instead, refer to the following instructions.

For Ancestry, click on “search,” click on “catalog,” and then keyword a state and the word “census”; e.g. New York census. For FamilySearch, click on “search,” click on “records,” click the United States map, and then choose a state from the list. Scroll down through the available records to search for individual census records.

In two weeks, we will take a look at some other valuable and overlooked census records.