 Censuses...
what can I say? If you've never experienced finding a whole missing family
before, you have not lived!! I call these "cluster" genealogy -- if you
find one, you usually find several members of the family. And I simply
LOVE IT when I find the parents and their daughter & her hubby living with them
-- GREAT way to find those married daughters' surnames. And people really
did marry "the boy next door"!
NOTE: I have received complaints over the years -- "Why don't you correct
the misspellings in the censuses?" -- when we transcribe censuses or other
genealogical material, we write what we see... Personally, I use a little more
lee-way when I "INDEX" something -- if the spelling is so outrageous, I will add
a note and INDEXES are indexes. The original census offers much more
information and well worth locating!
Censuses
are available at the 13 Federal Archives -- Shawano's closest one is Chicago on
S. Pulaski Road (great hot dog place nearby!). And most are available
through ancestry.com for a fee. Also, the Family History Library will send
censuses via microfilm to you at any of the 2200+ Family History Centers
throughout the world.
Censuses are almost as cool as a good
obituary!!! (By now you know how much I value obits aka "mini-biographies"!)
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