Federal and State Census Data

Intro:             The Federal and State Census

 

A large portion of the information herein comes from the State and Federal censuses as accessed through Ancestory.com.   However, the information found in these earlier records is subject to frequent errors. For those who recorded the census data, standardized spellings didn’t exist until the dictionary had made its way into the education system.  That ‘education system’ was also not standard nor required.  Most early spellings were the phonetic interpretations of the census taker listening to an answer to his questions given by someone who might not be able to provide a correct spelling of their name, and might not speak the same language.

‘In England it was not until Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that a truly noteworthy, reliable English Dictionary was deemed to have been produced, and the fact that today many people still mistakenly believe Johnson to have written the first English Dictionary is a testimony to this legacy.

In 1806, American Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language; it took twenty-seven years.  Webster completed his dictionary in 1825.  His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before. As a spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced American English spellings. He also added American words, like "skunk" and "squash" that did not appear in British dictionaries. At the age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828; it sold 2500 copies. In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes.’ Wikiped

What that leaves us with is understanding what people wrote doesn’t have a standard meaning using today’s definitions.

What the census really tells us with accuracy is where a family was at a given time.  Understanding that dates, even years, had less meaning before social security needed to know your age.  Having or reading a calendar might have no meaning at all to most farmers.  Planting was dictated by the moon phase and seasons, last year had no more meaning than the next years. Why bother to remember which year something occurred in?