From the death certificate of my great, great grandmother, Adeline Amanda (Holderman) Prickett, we can get the names of her parents as provided by the informant:
According to J.A. Prickett (Joel Andrew Prickett -- Adeline's son), the parents of "Addeline Amanday Prickett" were Jacob Holderman who was born in Germany and Caroline Loveland who was born in Ohio. From the death certificate you can see that Joel was at least a bit tentative about some of the information he was providing. For example, from other sources I know that her name was Adeline Amanda instead of Addeline Amanday. And the fact that the mother's name is hand written rather than typed suggests that it might have been added at a different time than the typed information.
I knew that Jane Ellen Prickett, my great grandmother and the daughter of Adeline, was born in Illinois (we saw that from her marriage certificate in another blog entry). But I didn't understand the connection with Ohio and Germany at all.
Article 1, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution says "Representatives...shall be apportioned among the several States ... according to their respective Numbers ....The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years." In other words, in order to determine the number of representatives in Congress, the government would count the number of people in each state within three years of the adoption of the Constitution and every ten years thereafter. The Constitution was adopted on 17 September 1787 and the first Federal Census was conducted in 1790. Every tenth year after 1790 another census was taken and representatives to Congress were reallocated. So the first census was in 1790, the second was in 1800, the third in 1810 and so on with the twenty-third census being taken in 2010. And to the benefit of American genealogists, almost all of these census records have been saved in the National Archives.
Initially the information collected by census takers was specifically aimed at the constitutional requirement. So the 1790 census tallied the number of free white males age 16 years and older, the number of free white males younger than age 16, the number of free white females, the number of other free people, and the number of slaves. When you look at the 1790 census you see a list of the head of each family and then the tally of people in these various categories. This tally methodology continued through the 1840 census albeit with slightly different age groups.
But beginning in 1850, the actual name of each person in the family was recorded along with some demographic information about that person! So the 1850 census included the following information for each person:
- Name
- Address
- Age
- Sex
- Color
- Whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane or idiotic
- Value of real estate owned
- Profession, occupation or trade of each male over 15 years of age
- Place of birth
- Whether married within the year
- Whether attended school within the year
- Whether unable to read and write
- Whether a pauper or convict
For a complete list of the type of information collected in each census, see the Wikipedia entry on the United States Census.
To protect the privacy of the individuals enumerated in the census, U.S. law requires that the information collected in a census be confidential until 72 years after the census was taken. For example, the census taken in 1900 was not publicly available until 1972. The census taken in 2010 will be publicly available in 2082. And the most recent census that was made public was the census taken in 1940 which became public in 2012. The idea is that it is usually not possible to find information in publicly available censuses about people who are still living.
Well this is wonderful! Since my great, great grandmother was born in 1835 (per her death certificate), she would be 15 years old in 1850 (the first census in which I would expected to see her name). Now all I have to do is go to the census and find her entry so that I can get information about her family! But wait...there's still a problem. According to the 1850 census there were 23,191,876 people enumerated in the United States. And guess what? Since the government's focus was tallying people, they did not attempt to provide an index to the names of people named in the census. I would have to go to the National Archives in Washington and work my way through volume after volume of 1850 census data hoping to find Adeline Amanda Holderman. I have a strong suspicion that Adeline was living in Illinois in 1850 (because Jane Ellen, Adeline's daughter, was born in Illinois in 1854), so I could begin my census search with the state of Illinois. But even so, Illinois had 851,470 people in the 1850 census and the task is still not easy. I don't really want to spend the rest of my lifetime just reading census information from 1850 in some back office in Washington!
Fortunately there have been various projects over the years that can help me. First of all, when the National Archives releases a census, they microfilm it and then distribute microfilm copies of the census to regional branches of the National Archives. Regional branches are located in the following cities:
- Atlanta, Georgia
- Boston, Massachusetts
- Chicago, Illinois
- Denver, Colorado
- Fort Worth, Texas
- Kansas City, Missouri
- New York City, New York
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Riverside, California
- San Bruno, California
- Seattle, Washington
Since I live in the Atlanta area, there is a branch near me. On a side note, even if you access census information in a more modern way on line, it is still interesting and useful to visit your nearest branch of the National Archives. Frequently each branch is the repository for information that is specific to that particular geographical area. So, for example, the Boston branch has original archival records for large parts of the colonial period in New England. The Atlanta branch has original records for events that happened in the south east, and so on. Here is the Wikipedia entry with much more information on the National Archives.
Many of the larger public libraries also purchase Federal Census microfilms...at least for the area they serve. Check with your local library and you might be surprised at the extent of the resources they have available for genealogists.
Okay, so let's assume that I've figured out a way to get access to the census records without having to travel to Washington. I still have the needle-in-a-haystack problem of finding my great, great grandmother among 851,470 people.
In the 1930s when FDR's administration implemented the Social Security Act, people needed to be able to prove their age. In another blog entry, I already described "delayed birth certificates" that were used for this purpose. But if you couldn't find anyone who could swear to the date of your birth, you had a problem...until someone realized that all of the affected people were most likely enumerated in Federal censuses. So one of the work projects that FDR had was to use a system called Soundex to index the 1880 census. I could spend an entire blog entry talking about Soundex, but instead I'll refer you to Wikipedia once again. By indexing the 1880 census, people who might be turning 65 in the 1930s could prove their age by finding themselves in the 1880 census. If you were 11 years old in 1880, then you should be 65 years old in 1934. Even after Social Security's need for the 1880 index was gone, the Soundex index survived. And in the 1980s when I began intensive genealogical research, this was the key to finding people in 1880. However only a few censuses were Soundexed, so the process of finding your ancestor was still hit and miss.
A Utah company called Accelerated Indexing Systems (AIS) took up the challenge and indexed a lot of the early censuses including the all important 1850 census where every individual was named. Almost always, any library or branch of the National Archives that had census microfilms would also have all or almost all of the AIS indices for those censuses.
If all else failed, and you knew the city or county where your ancestor lived, you could manually search the microfilm for that geographical area and sometimes find your ancestor. This is a slow and tedious process, but it does work and I've done this many times.
Now jump ahead to today's world and this clever device called a computer. At this point in time (2015) ALL of the census records that are public are available on web sites where you can simply enter the name of the person along with as much other information as you know and voila! The computer will list people who match the information you have entered! Ancestry.com is probably the gold standard for this type of capability, but this is a paid service. But FamilySearch.org, run by the Mormon Church, is very good and it is free!
Using any of the above methods for finding her, a search for Adeline Amanda Holderman born in 1835 in Ohio in the 1850 Federal Census led me to this census page:
Adaline is listed on line 9 as a 15 year old girl who was born in Ohio in the family of Jacob Holderman and Mercy C. Holderman. Jacob is 42 years old so he was born in 1808 in Ohio. Mercy C. Holderman is 38 years old so she was born in 1812 in Ohio. By looking at the ages and birthplaces of the remaining children we can infer how this family moved over the years. The first eight children were all born in Ohio, but the ninth child was born in Illinois. The eighth child is 5 years old and the ninth child is 3 years old. Since this census was taken in 1850, the conclusion is that sometime between 1845 and 1847 the family moved from Ohio to Illinois. One other thing pops out of this census record. The family was enumerated in Knox County, Illinois, which is almost all the way to Iowa. That is quite some distance from Grundy County, Illinois, where I would have expected to find them. Jacob is enumerated as a farmer, but what were they doing in Knox County?
The mystery continues!
In the 1930s when FDR's administration implemented the Social Security Act, people needed to be able to prove their age. In another blog entry, I already described "delayed birth certificates" that were used for this purpose. But if you couldn't find anyone who could swear to the date of your birth, you had a problem...until someone realized that all of the affected people were most likely enumerated in Federal censuses. So one of the work projects that FDR had was to use a system called Soundex to index the 1880 census. I could spend an entire blog entry talking about Soundex, but instead I'll refer you to Wikipedia once again. By indexing the 1880 census, people who might be turning 65 in the 1930s could prove their age by finding themselves in the 1880 census. If you were 11 years old in 1880, then you should be 65 years old in 1934. Even after Social Security's need for the 1880 index was gone, the Soundex index survived. And in the 1980s when I began intensive genealogical research, this was the key to finding people in 1880. However only a few censuses were Soundexed, so the process of finding your ancestor was still hit and miss.
A Utah company called Accelerated Indexing Systems (AIS) took up the challenge and indexed a lot of the early censuses including the all important 1850 census where every individual was named. Almost always, any library or branch of the National Archives that had census microfilms would also have all or almost all of the AIS indices for those censuses.
If all else failed, and you knew the city or county where your ancestor lived, you could manually search the microfilm for that geographical area and sometimes find your ancestor. This is a slow and tedious process, but it does work and I've done this many times.
Now jump ahead to today's world and this clever device called a computer. At this point in time (2015) ALL of the census records that are public are available on web sites where you can simply enter the name of the person along with as much other information as you know and voila! The computer will list people who match the information you have entered! Ancestry.com is probably the gold standard for this type of capability, but this is a paid service. But FamilySearch.org, run by the Mormon Church, is very good and it is free!
Using any of the above methods for finding her, a search for Adeline Amanda Holderman born in 1835 in Ohio in the 1850 Federal Census led me to this census page:
Adaline is listed on line 9 as a 15 year old girl who was born in Ohio in the family of Jacob Holderman and Mercy C. Holderman. Jacob is 42 years old so he was born in 1808 in Ohio. Mercy C. Holderman is 38 years old so she was born in 1812 in Ohio. By looking at the ages and birthplaces of the remaining children we can infer how this family moved over the years. The first eight children were all born in Ohio, but the ninth child was born in Illinois. The eighth child is 5 years old and the ninth child is 3 years old. Since this census was taken in 1850, the conclusion is that sometime between 1845 and 1847 the family moved from Ohio to Illinois. One other thing pops out of this census record. The family was enumerated in Knox County, Illinois, which is almost all the way to Iowa. That is quite some distance from Grundy County, Illinois, where I would have expected to find them. Jacob is enumerated as a farmer, but what were they doing in Knox County?
The mystery continues!
