[or-roots] more census whining

[Paulette]

I too have a bit of a similar census "thing" - where my great grandmother divorced in 1903 after 25 years of marriage and five kids (as per divorce records Oregon State Archives), and married her cousin who was at least 20 years younger than she was. Admittedly, in her second marriage photo, she is one good looking, and happy woman! But I'm still not quite clear on her actual birth date in Missouri, and her age keeps changing in the census records I have found.

Paulette

-----Original Message-----
>From: Leslie Chapman <reedsportchapmans at verizon.net>
>Sent: Mar 31, 2009 9:29 AM
>To: or-roots mail list <or-roots at listsmart.osl.state.or.us>
>Subject: Re: [or-roots] more census whining
>
>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
>
>
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