[or-roots] More Census headache

[Leslie Chapman]

Ronda;

One possibile explanation that has been discussed in here before is that a
lot of Census takers recopied thier info to the forms after taking rough
notes during their visits to the houses. Possibly that is how our ancestors
got erroneously recorded; the info was taken down in a disorganized form and
then carelessly copied.

I survey for a living and we always make notes about how we arrive at
various calculation results in the course of our work, yet very often when
we go back to our notes in order to restake something if it doesn't get
built the first time we stake it, we can't figure out what our notes mean
and sometimes conclude we blew it the first time and didn't actually stake
it right, or else our notes are not reflecting what we actually did, so I
can sympathize with Census takers not always making a clean copy that is
correct.

LEs C

-----Original Message-----
From: RondaRed at aol.com
Sent: Sunday, September 12, 2004 4:23 PM

I wanted to share my Census Headache and the interesting twist.
I searched for a very long time for my James Preston Johnson in the 1880
census in the household of his father. After a while we had reason to
believe his father was Shadrick Johnson. We had an old photograph also that
had Doc Johnson as the name of the man in the photograph. I searched and
searched for James P. Johnson and could find no trace of him anywhere. I
finally started searching the indexes for Shadrick Johnson and found one
that was the right age and was even listed as a physician, but he was alone
with no other Johnson's in the household. I kept going back to this Shadrick
Johnson as I just felt he was the right person but I couldn't figure out
where his family was. Then I took a look at the census image and a light
bulb went on. In the household was his wife and children but with a
different surname. Go figure this one out.


****** I believe Mary Earl, James P. Earl, Sarah Earl, and Edward Earl are
really the family of Shadrick Johnson, and that there was a mistake made on
the census. Mary, James P. and Sarah all match with Shadrick's family.
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