I’ve written before about the problems with census records (*1). In
addition to these issues, there are sometimes problems with how the software
that “reads” the scanned census sheets tries to decipher people’s handwriting
and build the searchable indexes into the records. I had to deal with this “in
spades” when trying to trace the family of my great-grandmother.
Starting from what you know
My great-grand father, Louis Russell, was married in 1892. The 1900
census lists his wife as “Annie” Russell. From burial records we know that her
full name was Anna Pauline Russell and we have her date of birth and death (in
1903).
Also, and very important, she listed that she was born in New York, that
her father was born in France, and her mother was born in Ireland. Since she is
living in western Connecticut, it’s most likely that she had come from the
Hudson River Valley of New York. And since she had been born in the 1870s, she
should be found in the 1880 census. So, with this information we need to start
a search.
Conflicting Information
Quite quickly, I found a promising family in Armenia, Dutchess County,
New York. There is a young girl in the family of the right age with the name of
Pauline. The father’s name has been deciphered by the translation software as
“Hever” and the mother as “Ann”. But while Ann is from Ireland, Hever is shown
as having been born in Switzerland. So we have two possible problems – the
conflict between France and Switzerland and what kind of name is “Hever”? Two
of the children, Jessie and Mary, are age 14 and 10, so let’s look for the
family with just these two children in the 1870 census.
Initially, I could find no common names of Hever, Ann, or Jessie in the
1870 census. But there was a Mary of the proper age, so I looked at that
family. The father’s name was translated as “Daria”, the mother was “Nancy”,
and the older girl was called “Susan”. The children’s ages were ok and it was
in the same town, but the ages of the parents are shown as 50 and 40, not
consistent with their ages 10 years later in the 1880 census as 53 and 40. And
what kind of man’s name is “Daria”? I needed to look closer.
Zooming in on the census record itself, I determined that the
translation software, while generally doing a good job, had gotten this one
quite wrong. The name in both cases was “Xavier”. In the 1870 census the “e”
and “r” ran together and looked like a lower case “a”, except that you could
detect the loop of the “e” when looking closely. And the “D” was because the
“X” was interfering with the “t” on the end of “Merchant”. In the 1880 census,
the “X” had been scanned as an “H” when it clearly was not like any other “H”
that the census taker wrote on that page, the initial “e” was actually an “a”,
the dot over the “i” was so far over that the rest of the letter ran together
with the “v”. Thus, the father’s name was actually “Xavier” in both census
records. The conflict between “Nancy” and “Ann” was pretty understandable and
apparently “Susan” was the middle name of the girl named “Jessie” in the later
census. I still didn’t understand the date conflict, nor the conflict between
“Switzerland” in the 1870 and 1880 census and the “France” in Anna Pauline’s
1900 census.
Further Searching
I then decided to trace down the family lines of Anna Pauline’s
siblings to see if I could find further information. Anna Pauline had three
sisters and one brother. With a 20 year gap until the 1900 census, the sisters
were all likely to have married and would have different last names, making it
a difficult search. But I had one stroke of luck.
In the 1900 census I found a “Justine Bedat” of an age that matched the
“Susan/Jessie” and whose parents were from Switzerland and Ireland. And,
fortuitously, living with she, her husband, and children, was her widowed
father – with the name transcribed as “Frank K”! But again, looking closely at
the actual record, it became clear that the “K” was actually an “X” – short for
“Xavier”. Thus, it seems that the real name of Anna Pauline’s sister was
“Justine Susan”, with the Susan given in 1870, and the nickname of Jessie in
1880.
Armed with Justine’s new family, I traced them through the 1910, 1920,
1930, and 1940 census. Interestingly, while in the 1910 and 1920 census she
listed her parents as being from Switzerland and Ireland, in the 1930 census
she listed them as being from France and Ireland – the same sort of mistake
that Anna Pauline had made in the 1900 census.
Conclusions
Anna Pauline’s father’s actual name was probably “Francis Xavier” –
good French names. He was from French-speaking Switzerland, hence the confusion
in later years. While he went by “Xavier” in 1870 and 1880, by 1900, as a 74-yo
widow he was called by the “Americanized” version of his first name, Frank. He
was born there in 1826 (consistent with the 1880 and 1900 census) and came to
the US in 1853 (as noted in the 1900 census). His age in the 1870 census is
incorrect, but everything else about him is consistent – just mis-transcribed
or mis-stated by his children.
Anna Pauline’s mother’s name is Nancy/Ann – I have not determined which
is correct. Lacking a consistent date of birth, and given that she only appears
in the 1870 and 1880 census (as she passed away before 1900) and both times
with an age of 40, it’s going to be difficult to go much further.
I have not been able to find any further information about Anna
Pauline’s sisters, but I was able to track her brother, Julius. I do now have a
rather complete descendant tree for her sister Justine [Merchant] Bedat, and
have even sent some inquiries to a couple of them for confirmation – they would
be some new 3rd cousins to me.
This has been an interesting exercise in investigation and trying to
get around all the inconsistencies in the US census records – conflicting
information, changing names, and most importantly, the vagaries of the
scanning/transcribing software that attempts to make sense of the handwriting
of the census taker.
Notes:
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