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Ancestry Daily News
9/20/2001 - Archive
1880 Census Beginnings
I was so excited I nearly hyperventilated. When the brown truck pulled
up in front of my house, I knew exactly what he was carrying: my 1880 United
States Census and National Index from the Family History Library.
I had waited for several years for the product to be complete and ready for
shipment. I had several problems I hoped the index would solve, including one
particular problem that had plagued me since the beginning of my research twenty
years ago.
I was looking for potential siblings of my Florence Ellen Butler Sargent, born
ca. 1857 in Missouri of Michigan-born parents. The plan was to go into the search
interface of the 1880 United States Census and search nationwide for individuals
with the surname Butler born in Missouri of Michigan-born parents. I was nearly
drooling as I opened the box and installed the software. I could see myself
entering the information in the search boxes and hitting "search." The problem
was that after installing the software, I did not see anyway to perform my search
directly. I was sorely disappointed. Florence (aka Ellen) is one of my biggest
stumbling blocks and I was hoping the 1880 census transcription and index would
help me directly.
Don't get me wrong. The census index is a wonderful tool and obviously the result
of a great deal of work and time. However, you are probably mistaken if you
think it is going to solve all of your research problems immediately.
The set of CDs come in two parts: the National Index and the transcriptions
of specific states or regions. The upside to the National Index is that it is
"national" in scope and can be helpful if the name is not common and one has
a good estimate of the date of birth. Sorting out common names can be difficult
in the National Index if one does not have an approximate date and place of
birth. This difficulty may be aggravated by:
An ancestor giving the census taker information different from what the
researcher has
Original handwriting that is difficult to read
Potential transcription errors
Inconsistencies in "abbreviations" for place names
Generally speaking, whenever possible it is best to search the state or region-specific
CDs that comprise the first thirty-five disks of this series.
With that in mind, I'll discuss how I eventually found one set of my ancestors
in the 1880 transcription using the appropriate state CD. We'll leave the Butlers
to later as I don't even have names of family members besides Ellen.
Trotting Around the 1880 Census
I was looking for the family of John Michael and Franciska Trautvetter who
lived in Hancock County, Illinois.
When I put in the CD for Illinois, the "search Illinois" box came up. I entered
John Michael in the Given name(s) box and Trautvetter in the last name box.
No such match. Even taking out the given names completely did not result in
any Trautvetter entry for John Michael.
I needed to think.
John Michael could easily have been listed under the following first names:
John
Michael
Mike
Jahn (a German equivalent--actually one of many)
Franciska could have easily been listed under:
Franciska
Frances
Fannie
A more effective way to search for this family would be to perform an advanced
query by going to "Search" on my menu and going to "neighbors-advanced query."
This brought up a search box with "Advanced Query" as the title.
I typed Michael in the "Query for:" box and there were 9533 entries. This means
that there were 9533 census entries where Michael was part of the entry. It
could be the first name, the last name, the village of residence, etc. 9533
were just too many for me to go through.
When I entered Michael and Frances in the "Query for:" box, there were several
numbers that appeared on the screen. The "records with hits" totaled 86. There
were 9533 hits for Michael, 4243 hits for Frances, 86 entries contained both
the name Michael and Frances. Clicking on "OK" took me to those specific hits
in the Illinois census. A scan of them did not reveal any families that appeared
to match my situation.
I did notice however, that there were both males and females named "Frances."
I decided that I needed to consider this as an alternate spelling. I wanted
to search for all the alternate spellings at once if possible. I now had at
least four possible spellings for the husband's name and four for the wife as
well. This results is 16 combinations if searched for separately. I really wanted
to avoid this if at all possible.
And thanks to the ability to perform Boolean searches on this dataset, I can.
In the "query for:" Box on the "advanced query" search, an "AND" is understood.
However, an AND is not the only way I can search. Basically what I now wanted
to do was look for those entries that had:
Michael, Mike, John, or Jahn
And
A Frances, Francis, Franciska, or Fannie
This can be done by entering (michael or mike or john or jahn) and (frances
or francis or franciska or fannie) in the "Query for" box
However, I now had 5266 matches. This was far too many for me to search manually.
The results screen displays the individual number of hits for each individual
search term:
Michael 9533
Mike 1459
John 145026
Jahn 31
There were 151720 entries that had at least one of these words in the entry.
Frances 4234
Francis 10590
Franciska 91
Fannie 5527
There were 20219 entries that had at least one of these words in the entry.
I added "and hancock" to the list. This was the county of residence and I was
hoping that adding this word to the list would do the trick and I would find
the family. Alas, I did not.
They Are There!!
It took a great deal of creative searching in order to find this family.
This family has been located in the 1880 census transcription and they were
located without a manual search of the transcription. When the location is known
with relative certainty a manual search should be conducted if the region is
not overly large. Even if the family is located on the 1880 Census CD, the actual
census entry should be viewed. This family though provides an excellent start
to our discussion of more advanced search techniques. Next week, we'll find
out how I eventually located this family and the procedure that was used. In
the meantime, those of you with the index, may wish to experiment with the Boolean
searching capabilities of the advanced query search. We'll learn more about
effectively using this powerful feature of the CDs in next week's article.
Editor's Note:
1880 U.S. Census and National Index
(Available for sale from FamilySearch)
www.familysearch.org
To learn how to use this index to locate individuals in Ancestry.com's Images
Online, see: www.ancestry.com/library/view/columns/compass/4027.asp
You can subscribe to Images Online at:
www.ancestry.com/subscribe/subscribeplanstx_v1.asp
Michael John Neill, is the Course I Coordinator at the Genealogical Institute
of Mid America (GIMA) held annually in Springfield, Illinois, and is also on
the faculty of Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg, Illinois. Michael is the
Web columnist for the FGS FORUM and is on the editorial board of the Illinois
State Genealogical Society Quarterly. He conducts seminars and lectures on a
wide variety of genealogical and computer topics and contributes to several
genealogical publications, including Ancestry and Genealogical Computing. You
can e-mail him at: mailto:mneill@asc.csc.cc.il.us
or visit his Web site at: www.rootdig.com/,
but he regrets that he is unable to assist with personal research.
Copyright 2001, MyFamily.com.
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