Shout out to Charles L. Hocker, Enumerator for Ohio County, Kentucky

[kdmorris]

For PRINTING his entire set of forms - all 26 beautiful legible forms.

[Dem2theMax]

1. I am BEYOND jealous!

I had to laugh when I saw the first pages I looked at - as though they used the thickest
sharpie they could find!

My Mom is from a VERY small town in PA. I cannot find her in the 1940 census. Mom is still
alive. She knows where she was living in 1940. But she, and her sisters, and her mother, are missing.
I'm wondering if someone missed part of the street she lived on, or if Ancestry.com missed
some pages of the town's census. AAAAARRRRGGGG.

It NEVER ends on her part of the family tree! LOL?

[tru]

3. look nearby

Dem2,

Check neighboring areas. You probably know this, but sometimes one side of a street is in one section and the other is in the neighboring section.

[Dem2theMax]

4. Oh, I have looked at EVERY page of the darned town.

Last edited Wed Apr 4, 2012, 09:23 PM - Edit history (2)

I am on my second go-round right now. Get this. My Mom KNEW the enumerator, or at least her family.
Mom is going on 94. I have my very own history book sitting in the kitchen, eating dinner as I type this!

Adding:

Now I'm on a second enumerator, and Mom knew her too!
And this one is taking data ACROSS THE STREET from my Mom's house.
I'm yelling the computer - GO ACROSS THE STREET, GO ACROSS THE STREET!

If I wasn't insane before I took up this 'hobby,' I sure am now.

Adding more:

FOUND THEM!!!! Must have been moving too fast yesterday. YEAH!!!!!!!!! Or is it YEAH!!1111!!!!!? Happy dance!

[tru]

5. Thinking back

I believe I have only been contacted about two censuses in my life, which is a heck of a lot longer than two decades.

[kdmorris]

6. Unfortunately, my people were not in that one

LOL.. the rest of Ohio County - they used the biggest sharpie they could find... and they wrote while on the back of a mule. Completely illegible.

[Dem2theMax]

7. LMAO!

I think Ruth Rush, the enumerator I'm following, was drunk at the time. You should see the writing.
It gets worse and worse as the pages go by. She's writing "this line is blank" instead of just leaving
blank lines, writes "end of block" in the lines, and has somehow forgotten houses on many streets.
On numerous pages she seems to have gone back to pick up the forgotten houses.
She'll have five or six streets on one page, and just one family listed for each of the streets.
And if you want to figure out the names of those folks, you'll have to find a way to
bring Ruth Rush back from the dead to decipher her handwriting.

In other words, just another day of genealogy. LOL!

[tru]

8. Ruth

Maybe people weren't home, so she had to revisit the houses.

[Dem2theMax]

9. That is a really good point.

And I bet she did in some cases. But Ruth also did something I've never
seen on a census report before. At more than one house, she would
write in the margin to the left of the data. What did she write there?
She wrote in who she got the data from, if it wasn't from the folks
who actually lived in the residence! At one house, she wrote
that she got the information from a Mrs. 'put the name of a neighbor'
in here, and a nurse. Go figure! LOL.

[tru]

12. Ruth

appears to have had OCD A fine quality in a data collector.

[tru]

2. every so often

I run across a census taker, for any of the censuses, with beautiful, careful handwriting, and I wish I could meet them and say Thank you! What were the supervisors thinking to let so much illegibility get accepted.

[PAMod]

11. That's really cool.

I've been at this (genealogy) for about 12 years and you're the first person I've "met" that had a direct ancestor doing the census.

What a great thing to find.

My retired father did it in 2010 and loved, loved every minute of it. I bet your grandfather did too.

[Rhiannon12866]

13. My mother worked for the census, came home with some stories...

She was also a stay-at-home mom (like many from her generation), but she went to work every ten years.