I'm responding to a previous Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver rather than the one posted today, so if it seems that my calendar is a little off, that's why.
Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission: Impossible! music, please!):
1. Which of your ancestors or relatives have you NOT found in the census records and what have you done or are doing to try to find that person? Can AI help?
2. Identify one or more of your ancestors that are inexplicably missing from one or more census collections. Why do you think they were not enumerated?
3. Share your information about your ancestor or relative NOT in the census records in your own blog post, write a comment on this blog post, or put it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system. Please leave a comment on this post so others can find it.
Thank you to Marian B. Wood for this SNGF idea.
1940 was not a good census year for finding members of my father's family. I have not found, and at this point do not expect to find, my father, his parents, his half-sisters, or his paternal grandmother in the census.
When the 1940 census was released, I of course excitedly began to look for all my relatives. Yet even after the names were indexed and searchable on FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com, I couldn't find my father and those other family members. And I knew all of their complete names and birth dates! I tried with names, without names, partial names, with birth information, without birth information, with location and without, and various combinations of those. I just couldn't find any of them.
At some point in his life (I suspect it was for a security clearance), my grandfather compiled a list of all the places at which he had lived. He had three different cities for 1940 (and four for 1935!). I checked all of them through Steve Morse's Unified Census ED Finder and then manually searched each of the enumeration districts. I found absolutely nothing having to do with my family. They apparently missed the census taker in all three cities due to their moves.
So that ruled out my father, grandparents, and aunts. I then focused on my great-grandmother. She was living in the same house that had been associated with her family since at least 1900, in which census I found her, her mother, and her granduncle and grandaunt. I even have a photograph of the house. I also have the street address, so I could narrow down my enumeration districts more finely than I had been able to for the searches for my father.
And when I searched the two enumeration districts that resulted from my use of Steve Morse's tools, I got . . . nothing again. After going through the pages twice to make sure I hadn't missed her, I found that her specific address was not enumerated, neither in the first listing by the census taker nor in the second go-round. It just isn't there. I don't know why the census taker didn't list her address, but it does not appear in the census.
I admit that I have not used AI to try to solve this, and I don't plan to try. I see no reason to think that AI can help or that it will magically make my family members appear out of nowhere. I have used the logical available tools. They simply were missed in the census, which happens to some people in every census enumeration.
I first searched for my father and his family in the 1940 census in 2012, soon after the census was released. I repeated the searches for this post, and those family members are still not in the census.
Wow! Three moves in one year doesn't bode well for finding people in any census. However, that certainly put a dent in finding your family members that year. It's also very weird that your great grandmother's address doesn't even appear in 1940. Were there other houses on the street? Could the street name have been changed?
ReplyDeleteOther houses on the street were enumerated. The street name actually is still the same, even now. If I remember correctly, one additional house number wasn't enumerated, but everything else on the street was.
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