Census analysis

The 1840 census of Marion County, Alabama, presents a situation I had never seen before. I had visited that census in search of one Benjamin Foster. I found on him p. 59 (reverse), line 1, with a white family of 10 and 25 enslaved people assigned to his household. Curiously, in 1850, he is enumerated again in Marion County, at which time is property valuation was set at $300. Hmhh. What happened in that decade to the Benjamin Foster family? ...

31 January 2015 A census record is a snapshot, a blink of a lens on one day, freezing in time a person or a family. Still, there is much more that we can glean from a census if we make it a habit to always analyze our person-of-interest in community context. To do otherwise, is to snip one negative from a roll of historic film and assume that the other negatives on that roll are totally unrelated subjects. For starters, we should ...

22 January 2015 Do you calculate and apply "census math" correctly? If the 1850 census says that a man is 33 years old and we calculate that he was born in 1817, odds are ...

16 April 2014

Yesterday, we posed a "test." You've brain-stormed the document well and offered good insight.  One relevant issue has not been raised. It’s one that absolutely affects the answer to the question we posed against yesterday's document.  So you don't have to flip back to that blog post, here's the problem:

15 April 2014 Census records are a mainstay of research into past societies. While using them, we encounter many situations that prompt us to think, Hunh? Why is this? Are my prior assumptions wrong?