(*Note: Almost every article results in a note from someone asking if Mac Users can do this, too. It is my impression that my friends using Office 2001 for the Macintosh computer can do everything in this series, except the maps.)

How Bad is Your Census-itivity?
Be warned that you can't get something for nothing. You can't make a worksheet dealing with census data if you don't already have some census data to put in. Census indexes are wonderful, but they won't do for this purpose. You need, preferably, an image and transcription of the census information. In short, you need input to get output, and the input you need today is census EVIDENCE.

You should know your census before you try to organize your census data. One of the great identifying things about the census is the collection of names in a household. There might be many Jesse Littrells, but they won't all live with a woman named Sarah and with a child named Robert. Even common first names are often distinguishable by the company they keep.

Every Story Tells A Picture
I got lucky researching this article when I was using a distant line of my mom's—Carroll County, AR, Littrell Family. There was a lot of information about them in the Ancestry World Family Tree. I got lucky because I have a subscription to the census information at Ancestry. I got lucky because the Carroll Co. USGenWeb group has a site that includes transcriptions, indexes, and images for parts of the periods I was looking for. I got lucky because someone already had a Web site with a spreadsheet analysis of a part of this family for a part of this time. And mostly, I got lucky because what looked like an easy family turned out to have a nasty twist to it.

It turns out there are at least four people named Jesse Littrell who were born between 1825 and 1840, who lived in either Lauderdale Co., AL, or Carroll Co., AR or both, and three of them were with a Sarah and the fourth was with a Sabra. Only by looking at their ages and the children's names was I able to reasonably tell them apart.

Where's the Data, We Want Data
On my Web site, there is a worksheet named "Census Comparison— Littrell.xls." There's a link for it below. It contains a worksheet for each son of Jesse Littrel, and a Census Index. There are other pages where I've put things that I might need later. The worksheets of interest to us are: JOHN, JOSEPH, FIELDING, ALFRED, JESSE SR, JESSE JR, SAMUEL, and CENSUS INDEX. Basically, the approach that I took was to start out by gathering all of the census information on Littrells that I could from Carroll Co., AR, Lauderdale Co., AL, and Lincoln Co., TN. I knew a little bit about how the family was put together, but as it turns out, I knew a lot less than I thought.

In the worksheet for each "Family" I listed the names of individuals, their birth and death dates (if known), and their birth state (if known) with a column for each person, and a row for each item. Below that, I started with the 1830 census and went through 1880 tracking each person from each of those families. I played around with using conditional formatting to tell me if a person aged less than nine or more than eleven years from one census to the next, or if (after 1850) the census said they were born in a different state from the previous census. I abandoned this practice as "Too Much Work" after proving the concept to myself.

It was very easy to look at a given column and see for whom I needed to continue to look up records. If you have nothing under a given person for 1860, and you have good reason to believe that they were alive then, you would reasonably conclude that there was a census record someplace.

Can You Make a Positive Indexification?
The CENSUS INDEX worksheet is a restatement of the information in the family worksheets, except that it's a tabular format so I can sort it. The columns are:

Year - the census year
Name - The name on the census form. Sometimes this is "m0-5" indicating a male 0-5 years old.
Place - A detailed place description, like the township and Enumeration District.
State - The state that the census reports.
County - The county that the census reports.
CodedName - The name of the individual that I think this person is.
Age - The age on the census.
Family - The family that I think this person belongs to.
BirthYear - The calculated birth year (census year-age)
Fath - The state the father was born in (if applicable)
Moth - The state the mother was born in.

After I have gathered the information, I can use this index to answer a variety of questions. You have a George who is 15 in 1860 you can't tie in? Look in the index for other George's who were 5 in 1850 or 25 in 1860. You find a war record for a Joseph? The index turned out to be a powerful tool to help me find people, because I could sort it on any column or set of columns I needed to at the time.

Link Me Up (more stars is better)
TN/AL Census ****
Glenn D Littrell, Glenn D Littrell, 2001, 5 July 2001
http://members.iquest.net/~martlet6/Genealogy/Tenn/tp2.htm
Terrific example of spreadsheet flexibility for census
Beau Sharbrough's Genealogy Articles ****
Beau Sharbrough, Beau Sharbrough, 11 July 2001, 11 July 2001
http://www.sharbrough.net/genealogy/genarticles.htm
Specific examples demonstrating the concepts in this series of articles.

What Else? A reader sent a note with a link that will interest the advanced user. From the Web page at: j-walk.com/ss/excel/files/xdate.htm you can download a freeware Excel Add-In named Xdate. The description includes, "Many users are surprised to discover that Excel cannot work with dates prior to the year 1900. The Extended Date Functions add-in (XDate) corrects this deficiency, and allows you to work with dates in the years 0100 through 9999." I regret to say that it requires Excel 97 or 2000. It likely doesn't work for Excel 2001.

Earlier in this series, I demonstrated that I'm the most Southern person I know. Using Excel maps, you can imagine my interest to learn that many of the people in Lauderdale and Carroll counties sympathized with the Union side, and that all of Jesse Sr's sons joined the 1st Arkansas Union Cavalry. By comparing Census and Military records, I learned that Joseph N, the son of John, was killed in action on 13 April 1864 at Carrollton, AR, in his home county. I reeled at the family's loss, and wondered again why they can't make a cigarette that makes you healthy, ice cream that makes you thin, and a war that doesn't take young men and women from their families. Excel is a great program, and genealogy is a wonderful pursuit, but things really fall into perspective sometimes. From what I can tell, Joseph, 20 years old at his death, lived almost three years after his father died in the same war.

Beau Sharbrough is the president of GENTECH, the founder of the GENTECH and FGS Web sites, and a founder of the Lexicon Working Group. He would like to hear from you at beau@sharbrough.net, but due to the volume of e-mail received, he is unable to answer every e-mail message received. Please note that he cannot assist you with your individual computer problems. Visit Beau's Web site for information about speaking engagements. Beau is the father of two college-age girls and is a proud graduate of Texas A&M University.