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  What if... Eagle@bellsouth.net (J. Hugh Sullivan) - 2020-05-05 19:22 +0000
    Re: What if... Dennis <nobody@nowhere.invalid> - 2020-05-05 15:57 -0400
    Re: What if... Denis Beauregard <denis.b-at-francogene.com@fr.invalid> - 2020-05-05 18:55 -0400
    Re: What if... Ian Goddard <ianng@austonley.org.uk> - 2020-05-06 12:41 +0100
    Re: What if... Richard Smith <richard@ex-parrot.com> - 2020-05-06 13:21 +0100
    Re: What if... dangnearhere@juno.com - 2020-07-12 19:55 -0700

#6502 — What if...

...a man appears on consecutive censuses in the same county, but not
on a third, do you normally record that he died during the period or
not if you can't locate him? By 1850 you might find his wife without
him.

If you record that he died is your source logic, guess, none or
something else?

Hugh

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#6503

On Tue, 05 May 2020 19:22:49 GMT, Eagle@bellsouth.net (J. Hugh Sullivan)
wrote:

>...a man appears on consecutive censuses in the same county, but not
>on a third, do you normally record that he died during the period or
>not if you can't locate him?

If he disappears from the 1850 census I record that he died "aft 1840"
with the 1840 census as the source.

-- 

Dennis

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#6504

On Tue, 05 May 2020 19:22:49 GMT, Eagle@bellsouth.net (J. Hugh
Sullivan) wrote in soc.genealogy.computing:

>...a man appears on consecutive censuses in the same county, but not
>on a third, do you normally record that he died during the period or
>not if you can't locate him? By 1850 you might find his wife without
>him.
>
>If you record that he died is your source logic, guess, none or
>something else?

Censuses are not always complete. From 1850, you may find the spouse
as a widow, so you can write dead between 1840 census and 1850 census.
But if you can't find the widow, you don't know if he is dead or if
the census is missing.

In my own database, I would say:


dead before census 1840
dead between census 1850 and 1855-12-15 (if dead in a record dated 
1855-12-15)
dead between census 1840 and census 1860 (if widow found in 1860).


Denis

-- 
Denis Beauregard - généalogiste émérite (FQSG) 
Les Français d'Amérique du Nord - http://www.francogene.com/gfan/gfan/998/
French in North America before 1722 - http://www.francogene.com/gfna/gfna/998/
Sur cédérom/DVD/USB à 1790 - On CD-ROM/DVD/USB to 1790

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#6505

On 05/05/2020 20:22, J. Hugh Sullivan wrote:
> ...a man appears on consecutive censuses in the same county, but not
> on a third, do you normally record that he died during the period or
> not if you can't locate him? By 1850 you might find his wife without
> him.
> 
> If you record that he died is your source logic, guess, none or
> something else?

The only thing you can reliably record is that you didn't find him.
One instance: ggfather's youngest brother present on 1851 but not 
thereafter.  Two of their older brothers had emigrated to Australia in 
1848.  The oldest half-brother emigrated to the US in 1852 or 3.  All 
that can be said of the youngest is that he couldn't be found in 1861. 
He may well have emigrated but the US branch appear not to have known of 
him in Chicago and I never found any other evidence of him elsewhere.

Another instance: trying to trace an ancestor of one of the visitors at 
the drop-in family history sessions I used to run.  He was a stone mason 
which tends to be a peripatetic profession.  His wife was on the census 
but down as wife in relation to head of family, not as head herself and 
not as widow which were a couple of clues to the fact he was still 
alive.  After a bit of searching we found him as a lodger, presumably 
working on some construction project.

"I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable statement and, if you don't, 
the only truthful one.  You might qualify it with some possible 
explanation and your reasoning but those are secondary.

Ian

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#6506

On 05/05/2020 20:22, J. Hugh Sullivan wrote:
> ...a man appears on consecutive censuses in the same county, but not
> on a third, do you normally record that he died during the period or
> not if you can't locate him? 

No, I wouldn't recording him as having died.  Unless the man is very 
old, there are lots of other very plausible explanations.  I'm guessing 
you haven't personally looked at every entry in the following census, so 
perhaps he is there but has been indexed incorrectly by whichever site 
you use to access the census.  Or perhaps he is present but his details 
have been written down incorrectly.  Maybe the census taker misheard the 
surname or simply got distracted and wrote down entirely the wrong word. 
  I once encountered a census entry where I'm fairly sure the man's 
occupation got written down as his surname.  (It was something like 
'baker', so at least plausible.)

Maybe the man was out of the county visiting friends or relatives, or 
travelling for employment.  That's particularly likely with certain jobs 
such as mariners, but itinerant labourers with no financial tie to an 
area often travelled surprising distances for work too.  It's also 
possible the man was in the county but not at home.  Certainly in the 
UK, he should be listed wherever he spent the night, but if it was a 
warm night and the man had not made it to his intended destination or 
was short on funds, he may have slept rough, perhaps in a barn, with or 
without the owner's permission.  I wouldn't then expect him to be 
recorded.  Or if he were caught out in a remote area, perhaps in bad 
weather, a local resident may have taken pity on him and allowed him to 
stay the night.  They may well not have known more than just his given 
name and have made something up for the census taker, or just ignored him.

Finally, it may be that he actively didn't want to be recorded.  Perhaps 
he was somewhere he shouldn't have been.  Maybe he was with a prostitute 
or another man's wife.  Maybe he was out committing a crime, or trying 
to evade detection for a previous crime.  Maybe he was trying to stay 
out of sight of some aspect of the government, perhaps because he owed 
money.  Maybe he has paranoid about what the government were going to do 
with the information.

Obviously some of these are more likely than others, but in my 
experience it's not uncommon for someone to go missing from a census for 
a decade or two and then reappear, with no clear explanation for their 
absence.  I can't find one set of my great grandparents on the 1891 or 
1901 census for example.  I now know that he was in the army stationed 
in the Bengal Presidency in 1891 and was fighting in the Boer War in 
1901, but I have no idea where his wife-to-be was.

Richard

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#6507

On Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 3:22:51 AM UTC+8, J. Hugh Sullivan wrote:
> ...a man appears on consecutive censuses in the same county, but not
> on a third, do you normally record that he died during the period or
> not if you can't locate him? By 1850 you might find his wife without
> him.
> 
> If you record that he died is your source logic, guess, none or
> something else?
> 

A woman might say she's a widow when she's actually divorced or a single mother since a widow was treated with respect in those days whereas a divorced woman or single mother might be treated contemptuously by some people, for example gossiped about and unable to get hired.

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