[or-roots] more census whining

[Leslie Chapman]

Pat;

The neighbor or whoever certainly can foul things up, but I believe the
examples I cited were deliberate obfuscation on the part of my kin or near
kin, the aging for example I am pretty sure was a case of a cradle robbing
woman who was embarrassed, or the husband was to admit she married a man
half her age. Even in our so called enlightened times that is cause for
comment. I remember a conversation my nephew who was my twin and I had once
about his sister who married a much older man and how stupidly we didn't
realize the friend who was with us when we had that conversation might have
been offended since his wife was almost twenty years older than him. I think
part of our stupidity was that she was so hot that the age  difference
wasn't near as significant to us as our jealousy of his "circumstances."

And the family of my neice were hill people from Tennesee and I suspect that
the Census taker to them was akin to a "revnoor."  If I find problems with a
family in one year I usually figure it is the person responding not having
the correct info. For example one of the folks I've been chasing in
Wisconsin reports his parents as b in NY and Pennsylvania. Actually his
mother was a Canadian, but she died when he was about two and his
step-mother joined the family when he was 6, so by the time he was reporting
his data to the Census taker he might very well not have even realized the
woman who raised him wasn't his mother. Back in the good old days (before I
reached adulthood) it was considered "best for the children" to keep them
ignorant of such things.

But the folks from the hills I follow from 1860 to 1920 and the main clue I
have that I am following the same clan is the numbers of children, the fact
that they never move and the fact that their surname is so odd that no
matter what they do to it, it still stands out on the page. They were
Teffetellers as I have them in my family file, but about all some of the
years have in common with some others is starting with a "T", having the f
sound; a couple of time they are Teph what ever and having an l somewhere
after the f sound. I think they vary from two to five sylables and the only
thing missing was noone ever indexed them or recorded them with an F at the
beginning. Of course some of the variation is simply ignorance or
indiffereance, but with these folks I am pretty sure it was deliberate,
there was just too many wild variations to be anything but deliberate.

My favorite ignorance story was right here at home with my great grandfather
who was Milan Melvin and his next door neighbor got one vowel right Milen
Milven. I never did figure that out on LDS index and only when I scanned the
film did I find them.

And in the final analysis I am sure a lot of the "wrong" information is just
simple expediency; in spite of the rather serious penalty for falsifying the
info I am sure the person responsible often found where they had not gotten
some info, or had not clearly recorded it or whatever and just made it up
either by assuming since the oldest and youngest child were born in the same
state, they all were which is what I find in one of my censuses, the problem
is he was railroad man and his two middle children were born in two other
states. And the person reporting it may just "make it up" to get rid of the
census taker; if you've got 8 children under the age of ten under foot, your
husband and the threshing crew are going to expect dinner on the table
promptly at 1:00 pm and you have some idiot with a form asking personal
questions about where you, he, his two brothers, one Uncle and third cousin
and four hired hands are from and where their parents are from, are you
gonna agonize over the right answer or tell him something just to get rid of
him?

I would bet that scenario had a lot to do with a lot of misinformation. I
have one census in Del Norte I am pretty sure the mother-in-law answered the
questions, all the parents were born the same place hers were which wasn't
even close to the truth for anyone but her daughter. She didn't even report
her husbands birthplace correctly. I don't remember for sure, but I suspect
that was probably some of my Irish Kin as that was NOT a popular place to be
from around 1900.

This is why we arent's "supposed" to fill in the blanks from census records,
but just use them as guidelines and why when i violate that rule as I
regularly do I always try to remember to not it in each persons record. I've
only been seriously burned that way once where I ultimately figured out that
a whole family group I put together from Census records were in no way
related to the people I wanted. It was such a lovely situation too, I had
the wife's parents and three or four children and followed them for 20 or
thirty years and it all fell apart when I found the husband I thought I was
following with a different wife and his widowed mother in California where
he had been the whole time. That is the penalty for having so many gypsies
in my bloodline, it is so rare to find a family in the same county in two
consecutive censuses that when I find them actually living in the same house
I am flabbergasted.

Les C