A note on accuracy: while it is always good to check, it might be heartening to know that the transcription of Census documents is remarkably accurate. One of the things we had to do for a grant that we were writing for a project I’m working on is justify the use of the transcriptions that volunteers submitted to Ancestry. Luckily, there is a team at U of Minnesota which has done research into this exact topic and we cited them heavily in our justification. The information in Census record transcription is over 95% accurate when cross compared to other known names and dates. I thought this was kinda cool
(Of course I say this as I’m following a French-Canadian side of my family that has had their name butchered in every Census record I’ve seen lol.)
Oh and apparently our justification was acceptable as we found out a few weeks ago that we’re almost certainly getting that NIH grant
The problem with Census is not all info is (or ever was) collected first-hand. After a number of attempts, you can use, eg, a neighbor as the respondent. And they might get some detail wrong.
Btw, I found my ggp’s Census and over three of them, ggf was born in Austria, Russia, and Poland. Granted, their section of Ukraine was part of A-H at one point and darned near Poland and later a USSR satellite. But, since I knew them and their town, I suspect it may have been as simple as the nationality of the Census taker and avoiding conflict.
Perhaps it’s 95% overall, but I would guess that it’s considerably less than 50% accurate for my relatives in the U.S., most of whom had uncommon (and in some cases extremely rare) Jewish surnames. In doing research for a friend, I was amazed at how often a fairly common name like “Zuckerman” was mis-indexed as “Luckerman.”
It feels the same here, Donna.
On the other hand, Mr. R’s very white, cookie-cutter family that’s been here for hundreds of years had an extremely rare misprint on their name.
As someone who works in archives with protected records, I often wonder how many of our family stories are hidden behind HIPAA and related laws. I have information on approximately 20,000 people and due to the fact that these are hospital records (and despite the fact that many have been dead for many decades), only I and my team will probably ever see these records. We’ve received inquiries from many relatives asking if their relatives are among the records and most of them are… but we can’t tell them that due to California state laws (among the most strict in the nation).
I despise it and it’s probably the hardest part of my job. My PI has been fighting with the Cali state gov to make them accessible- at least to family members- for years. No headway yet
I have a great aunt that I’m pretty sure was institutionalized and died young but I can’t find any record of it. I often wonder if someone is like me, holding her record, wanting to tell me and others about their relatives… but their hands are tied
One of my Catholic, French Canadian ancestors had Abraham as his first name, with a fairly common last name. In a sea of Jean Pauls, Jean Pierres, etc., he really stands out and I am forever grateful for that!
One of my male ancestors, though British, had an extremely unusual first name-- which one of the transcribers decided was “Anna”. I can only wonder at the census that listed “Anna” and “Fanny” as a married couple, with several children, more than a hundred years before the recent Supreme Court decision.
You inspired me to go back to familysearch and type in a name I’ve typed in many times before. This time, out popped my g-g-grandfather’s (first) marriage record! He came to California via NY, probably from Poland. But now I know for sure they lived in NY for a while, since I already knew their first child was born there.
That side of the family (maternal grandmother) is Jewish, and came from Germany and Poland to Northern California in the 1850’s, in the years after the Gold Rush. They probably came around the Horn, or across Nicaragua or Panama. G-g-grandfather was a pawnbroker in San Jose, leaving a great newspaper trail of lawsuits. The other g-g-grandfather started near the gold fields in Nevada County, and later had a dry goods business across the street from Levi Strauss in San Francisco.
Magnetron: My family also had farms (and vineyards) in the Central Valley. (Hanford & Lemoore)
That family married up with the German and English DAR branch, who were in Virginia during the Revolutionary War, then Cincinnati, and by around 1910 in LA.
My paternal g-grandfather came from Ireland in 1875. He ended up in San Francisco, too, but was also in New York City first. I recently visited the church where he was married (Holy Innocents on West 37th).
My grandmother came last, in 1903, from East Prussia on the Baltic Sea–now Poland, near Gdansk. Her uncle came all the way back from San Francisco to escort the family over, and then across the country. Six days after arrival at Ellis Island, my grandmother’s youngest sibling died along the way, in Colorado.
Three of the four branches of my family were in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake. My cousin (who lives in SF) and I went to the 100-year commemoration.
Also don’t neglect other ports of entry. Most of my family came in through Philadelphia, not Ellis Island. And some went to Canada and crossed the border from there. Ellis Island resources are great but if you reach a dead end there, consider the other ports.
Great reminder re the visa file. I’d also add - you can get the Social Security applications of people which reveal their full names and parents’ names and place of birth. It’s in their own handwriting which is pretty cool.
Keep in mind that if their parents died in the Old Country, your ancestors might just assign them more “Americanized” names than what they ever went by. For example my gfather’s mother was Fruma and he wrote her name on his SS application as Frances, but she died when he was young, never came to the U.S. and there’s no reason to believe that she would have ever heard that name much less used it.
Interview your old relatives. I cannot emphasize this enough. On my maternal side, my grandmother didn’t really know a lot but her sister was a treasure trove of info - and it was all exceedingly accurate once I dug into microfiche and hired the Bavarian researcher.
The number of babies women buried is really something that makes you glad for modern day medicine. My gg gmother had child 1, then children 2,3,4,5 all born and died, then 6-10 (8 was my gmother). She took 6-10 and came to the US and met back up with 1, who had come over as a young adult. I can’t imagine having a child born and live a few months and die and then repeat that several times. Ironically she and her husband were named Adam and Eve.
I learned a lot about 2 great-grandmothers through applications they had made for a military widow’s pension in the early 1900s, which were permitted even though both deceased spouses had fought for the Confederacy. The state of Texas sent me complete files on each.
My father’s ancestors left Ireland after famine and ended up cracking coal in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region. Mother’s side half-Irish and half-German…they came to US before 1900.
We were very fortunate that one of my great grandfather’s older brothers (born 1842) wrote a family history in the early 1900’s, which one of my great grandfather’s granddaughters had translated around 1970. Since the brother knew all his sibling’s spouses and their families it was a treasure trove and is how she was able to research my great great grandmother’s family back to Spain at the time of the Inquisition. My mom’s first cousin did all this before there was internet, too.
Another thing to remember when researching is that members of the same family might spell the last name differently. My great grandfather spelled the family name with an E, instead of an A - which is how the older brother spelled it and how it was originally spelled. Also, it had a Z in it which became a S (everyone used an S.)
The history had a lot more in it than just family genealogy. It described life in there village, their businesses, schooling, the decision to immigrate and life once they got here. That uncle’s branch of the family all settled in the south (Louisville) while my great grandfather went to Connecticut.
What is cool is that one of my Aunts, whenever anyone moved anywhere in the US, knew we had cousins there. So when my parents moved to Syracuse she was able to tell my mom we had 3rd/4th cousins on my great grandmothers side there and how we were related. Since they were our only family in Syracuse we became quite close to them. They were also able to fill in some blanks on that side of the family.
I was fortunate to discover a shortcut when researching my mother’s Bohemian family. Back in the 1700’s, all towns had to identify all buildings, farms, and homes by a numbering system starting with number #1 for the most prominent place, a church or town hall etc. All other houses were then numbered counterclockwise and this town went up to about number #90 or #95.
Once I figured out from a few births, christenings, marriages, or deaths that my ggf lived at #59 and his wife’s family lived at #33, it was easier to search. Rather than mull over scribbled and hard to read Czech surnames, I was just looking for house numbers. After I found the marriage dates for two brothers, I then found 10 of their children simply by following the numbers for several years after the marriages. They even dumbed it down for me by putting all of the numbers in a separate column. How thoughtful!
We just discovered a few months ago that after my grandfather’s family immigrated from Russia/Ukraine in the early 1900s, the surname was recorded three different ways, (on Census records) and since that branch of the family was somewhat estranged, we never were able to trace them until recently without figuring that out.
On the matter of adoption, I told my kids they own all this history, too. That, 100 years from now, new folks will look back and see them as the children of X and Y. Much as when old princes or wealthy people adopted an heir and the lineage continued. I know it’s a bit more complicated when a child was born in another country (mine are US,) but I wanted them to know that, just as I can feel some stake in DH’s details, they also have apart in this big mess of history, are leaves on the trees.
^ I did, too, LF. I also named my son the same first name of my great grandfather. He is the only one in my extremely large family to have his same name as it was not popular at all until fairly recently - so everyone before him only has same first letter of his name. S’s middle name is after my grandmother on my dad’s side. As far as I am concerned, my and H’s family’s history is his, also - even though he was born in another country.
My grandmother died in a public hospital in Massachusetts. I asked Mass archives if there was a record. They couldn’t find one, but found one from her previous hospitalization for the same illness at another hospital.
Mass archives let me have the record but redacted it.After my grandmother was hospitalized, the town sent a public health nurse to the home to see if any of the kids had caught the illness from her and to check on how my grandfather was doing on his own with a lot of small kids. Everything the public nurse said about the kids is blacked out. It’s my mother, for crying out loud! I’d love to know what the nurse said about the little girl my mom was–but nope they can’t tell me that! The weird thing is that this report was put into her mom’s medical file—at a hospital several hours away.
The saddest part though is that Mass archives appears to have thousands of patient records, some over 100 years old, sitting on shelves. If I hadn’t asked, I would never have found out about my grandmother’s.
Emily,the girls’ middle names are my grandmother’s and DH’s mother’s official first names. Neither relative went by those names. MIL’s was a name a female had in each gen, running back 200 years. Someday I’ll find the origin. My gm was called something simpler and more Americanized, starting in school. The girls like the connections.
