Early U.S. Census Records: Deciphering Two Case Studies

By Stephen Szabados

Census records are a snapshot of your family, and finding all of these records is an essential task in researching your family history. This book reviews two case studies that will give you hints on how to decipher the early U.S census, which is challenging to use because they list only the head of the household.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Szabados
• Release date: Jun 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393765141

Stephen Szabados

Steve Szabados grew up in Central Illinois and is a retired project manager living in the Chicago Suburbs. He received a Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and a Masters in Business Administration from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. Steve Szabados is an author and lecturer on genealogy. He has been researching his ancestors since 2000 and has traced ancestors back to the 1600s in New England, Virgina, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and the 1730’s in Poland, Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Slovenia. He has given numerous presentations to genealogical groups and libraries in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. His mission is to share his passion for Family History with as many people as he can. He is a former board member of Polish Genealogical Society of America, and he is a genealogy volunteer at the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. Steve also is the genealogy columnist for the Polish American Journal.

Book preview

Introduction

Census records are a snapshot of your family, and finding all of these records is a critical task in researching your family history. This book reviews two case studies that will give you hints on how to decipher the early U.S census, which is challenging to use because they list only the head of the household.

The U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1787, and Article One contains a mandate that we must take the Federal census every ten years starting in 1790. The primary purpose of taking a census is to count the population and set the number of members from each state in the House of Representatives. Counting heads and determining the number of congressional representatives does not require knowing the names of each household member. However, these early census records are challenging to genealogists as these researchers try to extend their family trees beyond the information included in the 1850 census records.

The information that the enumerator recorded on these early forms was simple and lacked most of the details that are seen in records from 1850 and later. The 1790 census was the first census and recorded three necessary pieces of information:

The county and state of residence

The name of the head of the household

The number of people in each household

The 1800 census added questions:

The gender and age range of household members

The township of residence.

The 1840 census included some demographic information, but census records did not record the names and actual ages of the household members until 1850.

Here is a summary of the information included in the census records