ROOTS & BRANCHES

As I’ve been writing this series of “Roots & Branches” columns as reflections on my first stab at teaching genealogy in the early 1990s, I’ve been thinking that I got a fair bit right in my curriculum for that continuing ed course.

But one thing I got very wrong was not introducing my students to the U.S. Census population schedules until the – gasp! – fourth (and therefore second last) of the sessions.

I’ve been trying to figure this out, since were I teaching this course today, use of the census would be one of the very first things I would acquaint them with.

It certainly wasn’t that I hadn’t used the census; one of my first genealogical forays was to the State Library of Pennsylvania (while I lived in the Harrisburg and had easy access to it), where I spent an entire day off scrolling through the three microfilm reels of the 1850 U.S. Census for Berks County – finding many of my families and adding ancestors just from the matching unmarried folks in their parents’ households to the data I already had on those people.

Maybe it partially reflected how much more difficult census research was at the time. There were some paper indexes to help, but you had to find a repository that had the microfilms for which you were looking and then get microfilm-reader elbow searching through page after page for the people you wanted.

Now, all the U.S. Censuses that are allowed to be opened to the public (they’re kept off limits by statute for 72 years, so 1940 is currently the latest available) are online and name searchable.

Whatever my thoughts were then, I now think that U.S. Census research is probably the record group that solves more problems for more genealogists and a great starting point for research.

In addition to census records, the fourth session of the course covered tax lists (suggesting their use mainly to “fill in” the years between the once-a-decade U.S. Census), ordering military records such as pension files and stressed that “whole-family genealogy” (investigating siblings of ancestors and cousins) was desirable, since items such as family Bibles might have been passed down in any branch of a family.

We also touched on strategies for solving brick walls due to illegitimacy or adoption … two areas that have been vastly affected by the new genealogy DNA testing that has come about in the last decade!

After we talked about all these types of records, there was a final session of the course: Making the trans-Atlantic connection for immigrant ancestors. That’s what “Roots & Branches will zero-in on next week.