Thursday, April 2, 2020

Genealogy Lesson #11: The 1910 U.S. Federal Census Maternity Questions

Part of the reason I have chosen my Losee line for these exercises is that I have already traced this line though more than 100 years of U.S. Census Records. I want you to see what can be learned by really reading a record.

This line arrived on this continent in the mid-1600s. I am not oblivious though to the fact that you may not have ancestors who lived in the U.S. this far back or even as far back as the 1940 Census. If you have found your family in previous census searches you might have seen that years of immigration and naturalization status were part of the data collected. I have lessons coming on searching for immigration records in the near future. Let’s see these census searches through though.

The 1910 Census is one of my favorites because it is only 1 of 2 census that collected data for what are known as the maternity questions. In 1910 and 1900 all adult women were asked 2 questions; how many children had they given birth to and how many of those children were now living.

When you go looking for my great-grandmother, Ethel, at age 14 living in Freeport, NY with her parents John and Flora Losee, I want you to scroll up and down the page; take note of the difference between the numbers reported by each mother. The difference between the two columns often indicates that there were children who didn’t live long enough to be reported in any census records. Now granted there are instances when a child was alive in 1900 and didn’t live to see the 1910 census. Maybe those “children” were even adult children. We are going to see if that is the case when we compare today’s search of the 1910 census with tomorrow’s search of the 1900 census.

If you have any questions, just message me. AND please continue to explore census records for your own ancestors if you can.

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