Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Best or Important Image or Document Recently Found Online

And I'm still falling behind and trying to catch up.  So it's Wednedsay; who says I can't post my Saturday Night Genealogy Fun tonight?  At least I have a document to share!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music here), is:

1.  What is the best or important image or document that you have recently found online? [Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting topics!]

2.  Write your own blog post, or add your response as a comment to this blog post or in a Facebook Status post or note.

I'm still noodling around with the 1950 census and finding stuff.  One page that I found has my father's two older paternal half-sisters:

They were living in Bridgeton, Cumberland County, New Jersey.  The census shows my aunt Dottie (Dorothy M.) married to Clarence N. Lore, with three children:  Albert L., Clarence G., and Joan.  Living with them is my aunt Mil (Mildred A.) Sellers.

This is an important find for a few reasons.  First is that my aunts, along with my father and his parents, were not enumerated in the 1940 census.  I have looked up, down, and sideways for them, and they're simply not there.  According to a list of addresses my grandfather compiled (possibly for a security clearance for work), they lived in three different places that year, so it's easy to understand how they could have been missed.

Second, the youngest child in the household, Joan (whom I was told was named JoAnn), did not live long past the 1950 census.  I don't have an exact date of death, but she died sometime around 1951–1952.  So I am thrilled to have her appear in a census.

Third, not only was my aunt Dottie one of the people who was "sampled" to give additional information (six people on every page), she was the one of the six who was asked even more questions!  She did not work during the year previous to the census; the last work she had was as a restaurant waitress; she had been married more than once; and she had borne three children.

And fourth, this is another example of how you need to verify all that information that shows up on the census.  My aunt Dottie told two different stories about her marriage to Zeke (Clarence; no, I have no idea how the nickname Zeke came out of Clarence), and I have not yet been able to check on whether they were actually legally married (because if the person you are marrying hasn't gotten divorced, yours doesn't count as a legal marriage).  So the fact that the census says they were married might or might not be true.

Um, married more than once?  I've never heard that, either from my aunt or my cousins.  I don't know what she had in mind, but now I need to check around and see if she was married to someone before Zeke.

And three children?  Nope, she had borne four children by this time.  The one not accounted for was Raymond Lawrence Sellers, born September 23, 1945.  Dottie gave him up for adoption, I believe that same year.  I am still trying to find him.

So don't believe everything you read in the census.

Something else important about this discovery is that my cousin Albert is still alive.  I get to show him himself and his family in the 1950 census!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Genealogy Search/Research Did You Do Last Week?

I'm very happy that Randy is now feeling healthy enough to resume posting on his blog, but I'm disappointed in myself that I didn't catch up with any additional old posts yet.  I'll just keep trying!  Here is this week's challenge:

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music here) is:

1.  What genealogy search/research did you do last week?  Did you have a research goal or plan?  Tell us about one or more search/research session.

2.  Write your own blog post or add your response as a comment to this blog post or in a Facebook Status post or note.

Aw, man!  Well, I didn't do much this week, but I did do a little research.

I worked some more on finding people in the 1950 census, not for my own family, but for that of a friend.  He had remembered that a cousin had put together a short family history and finally dug it out.  Based on the mostly accurate information in it, I was able to find my friend's great-grandmother and her second husband in the 1930 and 1940 censuses and then the second husband as a widower in the 1950 census.  I discovered they were Germans from Russia, which I actually have a fair amount of experience researching.  Now I'm hunting for them in Canada in earlier records.

The other research I did was trying to figure out how a DNA cousin who showed up on Ancestry is connected to me.  I have a total failure there so far.  The surname doesn't appear anywhere in my family tree, and I can't find any connections yet.

Obviously I am far behind Randy in my accomplishments this week!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your 1950 U.S. Census Finds

I visited Geneamusings.com to find out the theme for today's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun and discovered that meme host Randy Seaver is in the hospital anxiously awaiting open-heart surgery on Monday.  Not only is it a very survivable surgery these days, it was even decades ago, when my maternal grandfather had the procedure.  He had an excellent recovery and lived about another 20+ years after his surgery.  So I have faith that Randy will do the same.  And while he is unable to create new Saturday Night Genealogy Fun posts for us, I will go back and catch up on several that I missed when I was under the weather.  "Your 1950 U.S. Census Finds" is from April 5, 2022.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music here), is:

1.  The 1950 United States census was released by the U.S. National Archives on Friday, 1 April 2022.  

2.  Did you make a list of your census targets and try to find them in the 1950 census?  How did your plans pay off — did you find everyone, or just some of them?

3.  Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.  Be sure to leave a link with your answers in a comment.

Here's mine:

I did make a list of my many 1950 census targets (dozens of people), and I did try to find them within the first couple of days after the census was released online.  I struck out — I didn't find a single person.  I admit that I had not collected addresses, so I was relying on the rudimentary name index that was created by the National Archives.

But that was okay — I didn't expect to find them with the very basic name index, because most of the people I was looking for were in large cities, such as New York City (Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx), Los Angeles, and Chicago.  And even though I had been looking forward to the 1950 census release pretty much since the 1940 census was released, I had decided I wasn't in a hurry.  I waited a couple of weeks to see how the Ancestry AI indexing would go.

Well, actually I waited almost a month and then tried NARA again.  On April 26 I looked for the older sister of a friend of mine — and found her!  Granted, she had an extremely uncommon given name, and I knew she should be in Wyoming (not a lot of people!), so it wasn't as difficult as it could have been.

The next opportunity I had time to sit down and poke around was May 5.  The AI had been going gangbusters apparently, because searching on Ancestry I was able to find my maternal grandparents (with my mother and the older of my two uncles), my paternal grandparents (with my father), my father's paternal half-sisters, my boyfriend's mother and her mother (separate households), the friend herself (from the previous paragraph) in Wyoming, another friend's mother, and one friend himself, all within the space of an hour and a half.

Then I got distracted and didn't search again until May 16, when I found six somewhat distant cousins, siblings from one family.  Why did I look for them next?  I was actually searching for my great-great-grandfather's second wife (he missed the 1950 census by two years, having died in 1948).  His second wife was his niece; I have been told this kind of marraige was not uncommon among Jews in Eastern Europe, when the man was older and needed someone to take care of him.  It was in no way supposed to be a "romantic" marriage; the wife was more like a nurse.  I even have another marriage like that in my family.

Anyway, I remembered that Ethel had died in 1952 and decided I wanted to find her.  I couldn't, but it occurred to me that she might have been living with one of her children, so I started looking for all of them.  I found them — but not Ethel.  So she is missing so far.

Also missing is my (half) first cousin, who was my mother's best friend growing up in Miami.  She is my father's (half) niece, from his oldest half-sister, who was my paternal grandmother's first child.  My cousin was born in 1941, so she absolutely should be in the 1950 census.  I just looked and couldn't find her, her mother, or her stepfather (her mother married her third husband in 1946).  I don't know if this is a failure of the index or if my aunt and cousin were missed in the census.  Guess I need to call my cousin!

These images are my two most important finds in the 1950 census so far.  My father and all of his immediate family were completely missed in the 1940 census, so I really did want to find them in 1950.  I had been hoping to show the census to my father, but he died in 2019.

My mother didn't appear in the 1940 census because she was born in November 1940.  She died in 1995, not even close to the release of the 1950 census.  But because she missed the 1940 census by just a few months, I am glad I found her in 1950.

And you know that age-old discussion of how accurate you should take the information in the census to be?  It's important to remember that it's second-hand information and you should always verify it, not only because the person talking to the census taker might have gotten some of the facts wrong accidentally, but also because sometimes people just didn't tell the truth.  The latter is the case with the reported marital status of my paternal grandparents, listed as Bertram L. and Ann Sellers.  My grandparents were never married, because my grandfather didn't divorce his first wife, whom he married in 1923, until 1952 or so, after he left my grandmother to run off with another woman.  That woman insisted on seeing his divorce papers to make sure she wasn't running around with a married man (as she told me, "I was a good Christian girl").  As far as I know, my grandmother was a good Christian girl also, but I've gotten the impression that my grandfather may have been a smooth talker.  (My grandmother knew she wasn't married to him, because she acknowledged that in a letter to a lawyer several years later.)

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Where Were Your Ancestral Families in the 1950 U.S. Census?

Randy Seaver is getting the jump on things, because the 1950 census won't be available for more than two years, but this week in Saturday Night Genealogy Fun we can think ahead.

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along; cue the Mission:  Impossible! music!):

(1) The 1950 United States census release to the public is just over two years away (on 1 April 2022).  

(2) Who in your ancestral families will be in the 1950 census?  Where will they be residing?  What occupations will they have?  The official date was 1 April 1950.

(3) Share your conjectures with us in your own blog post, in a comment on this blog post, or in a Facebook message.  Please leave a comment on this blog noting where your conjectures are located.

Okay, since Randy said "ancestral families", I"m going to stick to my direct lines.  Collateral lines are not "indirect ancestors", they're not ancestors at all.

My father should be living with his parents, who in 1950 were still together.  According to the list of his residences that my grandfather wrote up, from 1946 to 1952 he was living on Union Mills Road in Mount Holly, New Jersey, so that's where I will expect to find my grandfather, grandmother, and father.  My father would have been 14 when the census taker came around, so I don't think he was working yet.  My grandfather might have been working for the Army at Fort Dix.  I have no idea whether my grandmother was working, but if I had to guess I would say no.

• B. L. Sellers, Sr., age 47, born New Jersey
• Anna Sellers, age 57, born New Jersey
• Lynn Sellers, age 14, born New Jersey
• Mildred Sellers, age 21, born New Jersey (maybe in the household)

My paternal grandfather's mother should also be in Mount Holly, probably on Broad Street at the same house in which she was living in 1940 but wasn't enumerated (that address is missing from the 1940 census).  She might have retired by then.

• Laura Ireland, age 68, born New Jersey

My paternal grandmother's parents were both alive in 1950.  They were probably in Mount Holly; I don't have an address.  Considering their ages, I hope they were retired.

• Thomas K. Gauntt, age 79, born New Jersey
• Jane Gauntt, age 78, born England

My mother should be with her parents, but I don't know if they will be in Miami, Florida or in Brooklyn, New York.  I think by that time they had moved to Miami.  My mother was 9 when the census taker visited, so she won't be working.  My grandfather might be a taxi driver, and my grandmother might be working in real estate or else a housewife.

• Abe Meckler, age 37, born New York
• Lily Meckler, age 31, born New York
• Myra Meckler, age 9, born New York
• Martin Meckler, age 6, born New York

My maternal grandfather's mother had already passed away, but his father was still alive in 1950.  He should be in Brooklyn, although I don't know an address.  In 1953 he was living at 591 Sneider Avenue, so maybe he was there in 1950.  I don't know if he will be working.  Hey, there were rumors that he remarried after my great-grandmother died; if that was true, maybe I'll find the second wife with him in the 1950 census!

• Morris Mackler, age about 68, born Russia

My maternal grandmother's parents were both alive in 1950.  They should also be in Brooklyn, I think on Livonia.  My great-grandfather was probably still working in the clothing industry.  My great-grandmother was a housewife and never worked outside the home that I know of.

• Joe Gordon, age about 58, born Russia
• Sarah Gordon, age about 59, born Russia

And I think that's it.  I've accounted for all my known great-grandparents, and my last great-great-grandparents died in 1948.

Getting a Jump on the 1950 U.S. Census

Wait!  What's that?  We just got access to the 1940 census last year; I couldn't possibly be talking about the 1950 census already, could I?

Oh, yes, I can!  Remember the great finding aids that were available on the One-Step Website for the 1940 census before Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, and others created searchable indices?  Well, Joel Weintraub has announced the opening of the "One-Step 1950 Census Locational Tool Project."

"Project 1950" will prepare searchable Enumeration Distriction (ED) definitions and street indices in preparation for the opening of the 1950 census in April 2022.  It took about 125 volunteers to produce the tools for the 1940 census.

The work for the 1950 census will be in two phases.  Phase I will be the transcription of the ED definitions, and Phase II will create urban area street indices.  An explanation of the two phases and the work to be done is at http://www.stevemorse.org/census/project1950intro.html.  Joel said, "It may seem too early to be doing this, but it took us over seven years to produce the 1940 tools that were used by the National Archives, the New York Public Library, Ancestry.com, and millions of researchers."

Joel said they don't need "too many" volunteers, just enough dedicated ones.  If you are interested in helping, first read the information about the work to be done, then contact Joel at the e-mail address listed on the above page.

The 1950 census can't get here soon enough for me.  My mother was born in November 1940 so missed showing up, and my father's family moved around too much that year and were missed.