I Love a Mystery

I love mysteries! I love reading them, pitting myself against the detective trying to figure out whodunit. Mysteries make me use my brain and all my powers of logic. They keep me engaged.

Genealogy can sometimes be like solving a mystery. I have found several mysteries in my family and proudly solved them. When I am able to figure out something that isn't quite right, it makes me feel a sense of accomplishment.

Here is the latest mystery I solved. I call it the case of the 1910 census Bennett children conundrum.

Recently, I was working on a 1910 census. I found one of those mysteries on my paternal grandparents census. The census sheet had my grandfather, grandmother and three uncles, Willie, Harry and Charley. It indicated my grandfather was married twice, which was true. It indicated my grandmother was married once, again true. It showed she was the mother of seven with three living at home. This is where the mystery came in. At that point, my grandmother had only had four children, two sons and two daughters. My grandfather had two children with his first wife and then four with my grandmother, making a total of six children not seven. I realized after looking closely at the birth years of my aunts and uncles, the census taker had incorrectly listed my aunt as a four year old male named Harry, when in reality it should have been a four year old female named Carrie. I did have an Uncle Harry, but he was born seven years later. That cleared up that mystery. The other six children mystery remained.

I remembered I had two aunts who died in the early 1900s, that explained away those two, leaving four children. Then I realized my grandmother was pregnant at the time of the census with my Uncle Wallace, who was born in August of 1910. That explained away why there wasn't at least four living at home. They must have listed my unborn uncle as the seventh child. That left my Uncle Forrest, who was my grandfather's son from his first wife. I couldn't figure out why he wasn't living in their house because he was 15 years old at the time of the census. I had no idea why he wasn't on the census sheet and no one to ask.

I put that to the back of my mind and continued working on the 1910 census. I ran across a census sheet from the same year but different county, and there, on that census sheet, was my Uncle Forrest. He was living with my great-grandmother. She had lost my great-grandfather the previous year. I can only assume my Uncle Forrest was living with her because she was what would have been considered elderly at that time, and was living alone.

I had solved the mystery of the 1910 census Bennett children conundrum!! Case closed.

And speaking of censuses, I found a website that has some blank census sheets in PDF form from 1790 through 2010. The website is the United States Census Bureau. While Legacy software offers blank census sheets, their sheets are somewhat abbreviated and the columns don't quite match the columns on the official sheets. The census sheets on this website seem to be replicates of the original census sheets, making it easier to match up what is on the images.

Well, that is it for this blog. Hope you find the census sheet website as useful as I did.  Peace, love and happines. . .Namaste!