Saturday, May 1, 2010

U.S. Census non-population schedules

So these are new records that can be found on ancestry. As of right now, they're only available for 1850-1880, and only for a few states one of which, luckily for me, is New York. Unlike the regular census, these non-population schedules only list heads of households and give no family information, but what's interesting to me is their use as a tool to round out the picture a little more, make my ancestor's lives a little more clear in terms of what they did for a living and some of the facts about that.

So, far example, we have J.J. Raynor, my great great grandfather, living in Freeport in 1880 in the non-population schedule for agriculture. He owned 16 acres - 13 of which were tilled, 2 of which were permanent meadow, and one which was woodland. His farmland was valued at 2000, his livestock at 75. He had no hired hands and he had one horse. He had sold one living cow the previous year, and owned 2 pigs and 30 chickens. He grew Indian corn and potatoes.

Now, Friedrich Stutzmann, my 3rd great grandfather, was living in Brooklyn in 1880 where according to the non-population schedule of industry, he worked in boots and shoes (this is the trade he was apprenticed to growing up in Germany). He employed 1 male over the age of 16, and worked 14-hour days.

Now lets go back to my mom's side of the family. Thomas Dauch, my 3rd great grandfather, owned 45 acres of tilled land in 1880 in Queens County, town not specified, but either Hempstead or East Meadow. His farm was valued at 3000 and his livestock at 600. He also owned 4 horses. Five calves were born on his farm that year; he purchased 3 head of cattle and sold 3, living. He sold more than twice as much milk as any of his neighbors that year, and also had 4 pigs and 12 chickens. On his land, he grew Indian corn, oats, wheat, potatoes (potato farming was very big in Long Island history), and also had an acre of land with 40 apple trees.

Besides the rounding out, I'm also hoping that maybe some of my relatives who are just completely missing from the census, such as John Horgan and John Meinberg, will possibly be somewhere in this resource. It won't give me ages or birthplaces but it might tell me a little something more about them than I know now...

Questions about Catherine

I don't know exactly when John Meinberg died, but I know it was probably sometime between 1875, when his youngest child was born, and 1880, when his widow Catherine married George Hellmann, but I wonder what made Catherine, who was in her late 30s at the time of her second marriage, marry George, who was only 24 at the time? Yes, she had young children so maybe she needed someone to support them, but I have other ancestors who were widowed with young children who never remarried. And he was so young! How did they meet? If she did it for the support, wouldn't she have been better off marrying someone older and established in his trade/profession? They had a daughter, Katherine, within a year or so of getting married. Maybe she was pregnant and they *had* to get married... And George was dead within a few years then, too...was Catherine some sort of Black Widow?

That is all for now.