I have been looking at the Canadian censuses for the past few weeks as I research my family. I am amazed at the misspellings, both on the censuses and in the transcriptions. For example, I could not find Frank Bolivar Jaques in the 1911 census. I searched first using the full name of him, then his wife Alice Maud, his daughter Ruby Jean and his son Ransom Earl. I finally found them by searching for just Ruby with no last name and for some lucky reason I was able to figure out from the results that I had the correct family. They were transcribed as Olver Frak, Hallice Mal, Rusggesn, and Ramson Esek. Interesting enough, the last name, Jaques, was spelled correctly in every instance. I thought they were pretty clear on the original, but apparently the transcriber didn’t see what I could see. One needs to imagine every possible spelling of a name when searching, even if it’s way out there!

Very true. I’ve had Hebert kin transformed into ‘Abear’ by English enumerators in Canada and Waspes in Bristol transcribed as ‘Warpe’. As you say, it pays to keep looking and to look at the original images if you can. Thanks for sharing! Stacey

Census clerk wrote the wrong nane when recopying the 1830 schedule??? I had a problem in the 1830 census of Paris, NY (near Utica, NY)… My Charles Bartlett family was in that area in 1820, 1825, 1835 and 1840, but not in the 1830 census index… That did not follow logic to me, so I decided to wrestle with it… In the 1825 NY State census of Paris, NY, Charles Bartlett had 100 acres of land, 13 in the household, they had 16 cattle, 4 horses, 1 hog and 57 sheep, and they made 135 yards of cloth in the domestic way in the previous year. In 1835 they are still there, so I could not see why they were not in the 1830 census. First, I rechecked the 1830 index… then, I read the whole town of Paris, name by name in case he was left out of the index… still nothing… I decided to photocopy the whole town listing, so I could study it at home… a few days later, an idea came to me: my family had 13 in it, so I looked at the column with the totals for the families and looked for families with over ten persons in them… that eliminated most families and then I had to look at only about 10 – 15 families in detail… One family stood out as similar to the Charles Bartlett family… and the head had the same first name…. however the last name was written Barnard… I decided to test the info from the 1830 against the family Bible record that was handed down from them… I listed each name and how old they would be in 1830, then compared each census entry, one by one, from parents down to the youngest child… each matched perfectly, except for one daughter who was missing… she was 21 and by then had probably married, and she was accounted for by finding her husband’s name in the 1830 with a wife of the right age. So, I propose that “Charles Barnard” was really Charles Bartlett. If I hadn’t copied the town and took it home to study, I’d probably still be wondering why they weren’t in the 1830 census. Yes, I checked the Barnards… there were some in the area, but not a Charles in 1830, so I expect the clerks handcopying the data got some of the info confused… I also had to work for the 1835 census data… the local indexer had misread the last name, but it was close enough to be suspicious in the index, so I looked it up anyway and discovered their error… a descending g from the line above made the Bartlett name look differently to the indexer, but to me it was clearly Bartlett. Yes, we have fun using indexes, census listings and sometimes we have to become detectives… my Bartletts and relatives have lived in the Paris, NY, area for 200+ years. Happy hunting! Loren Fay Albany, NY.

I have an amusing comment from census searching in the mid-west states… My Fays “begin” in Ohio, then go to Ontario, then to Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and some have gone further west to Washington in more recent years, tho my grandparents came east to NY and CT before settling down in Homer, NY, where my parents met at church and school… In the 1860 – 1900 period, I have fun with indexes for my Fays, because they were Edward, or Edwin, or Edmund, or Edwin William or William Edwin Fay… almost seemed like they had a differnt name in each census, like they were trying to be untraceable. My next generation did similar with James Henry Fay or just plain Henry Fay. and his inlaws did similar with James Edward Campbell…. makes census work even more interesting… sometimes with the modertn computer searches, I just put in Fay or Campbell and click on the county and town that I expect them to be in, or find new places they lived in. Loren Fay Albany, NY