Is Something Missing? Analyzing an 1820 Census
Your ancestor and his brother were enumerated in Kings County, New York, in both the 1810 and 1830 federal censuses. But you haven’t been able to find either of them in the 1820 census. You went through every one of the 86 pages on 43 images for 1820 Kings County, but their names don’t appear. The question arose: Is it possible to determine if a page of the census is missing?
The answer is an easy “yes.” What follows may be a lot of words, mainly to illustrate the kinds of issues you can run into, but the methodology I’m using is simple and broadly applicable to other times and places. It’s a process that will achieve several inter-related goals:
- identify problems in the digitization process that mislead and confuse researchers, including the mislabeling of locations and the presentation of pages out of original order;
- determine the actual locations referenced in the actual census pages;
- determine the original order of the census pages; and
- determine if a page is missing from a particular digitized collection.
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About Author
Aaron Goodwin
Aaron is a genealogist and house historian specializing in New York City research across all time periods, from the Dutch colonial era to the 20th century. His book, New York City Municipal Archives: An Authorized Guide for Family Historians, won the National Genealogical Society’s 2017 Award for Excellence: Genealogical Methods and Sources. He is also editor of NGS Monthly, former contributing editor of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, and former editor of the Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine. In 2011, he received the American Society of Genealogists’ Scholar Award.