How far do you go with your genealogy research?

I mentioned in the last blog that I couldn't find Saul Ber Milstein in the 1900 census.  Not sure, but I may have to give up on this one.

Business are not listed in the census.  That should be clue number one.

In the 1900s, a lot of people rented small rooms in the rear of a business.  Cheap rent.  And the census takers may well have missed these tiny apartments.  Just something to keep in the back of your mind.

I found this early map of Denver:

And with a bit of research, I learned that Walnut street on this map was also Market Street.  I was looking for 137 Market street which would be in the 100 block - where the red 61 is.  I was also looking for Colfax Street between Bryant and Clay St....which we can see just to the west of the 100 block of Market street.



This whole are is now gone...buried under the I-25/Colfa intersection.  But it shows you right where the Colfax viaduct was!

In the 1897, 1898, 1899 and 1900 city directories, Suel B Milstein lived at 137 Market Street.  His meat market was between Bryant and Clay.

In the 1901 city directory, S. B. Milstein lived at 2532 W Colfax

So while S B Milstein is not listed in the 1900 census, I can still go to that census and find these streets and go house to house looking to see if I can find a surname that was incorrectly transcribed.  Trust me, I have found many such errors over the years.

However, when I tracked down 137 Market Street....here's the page from the census:

The street is written down the left side of the margin.  The first number is the house number.  There is no 137 Market street.  I checked several pages before and after this just to make sure it wasn't put on the wrong page.  I did the same thing for everything on Byrant and Clay streets and the cross streets. And the same for the 1901 address on W Colfax....which was where they had moved their butcher shop to.  Nothing.

So I can only assume that they were missed in the census count since they were there in the city directories.  The other possibility is that they were moving during the 2 week period the census was being taken.  That's always a possibility.

I'm sharing this for 3 reasons.

1)  My research is pretty thorough.  I don't trust ancestry or familysearch to have correctly digitized or transcribed names.  I believe in human errors.  We all make them!

2)  You can do the very same thing in an attempt to find your family.  Sadly, the streets have not been indexed and 1900 is tough to do.  You can find an enumeration district and from there, get a description of the boundaries of each section.  Comparing that to a map of the same timeframe, you can almost figure out which precinct to look at.  Most are between 20 and 50 pages.  You sit and scan each page one by one.  There is no map that matches precincts to this census.  Fortunately, we do have great maps for the 1930 and 1940 census.

3).  Some of the microfilmed scans have complete areas of black.  When that happens within a neighborhood I am searching, I can assume my family might have been blacked out with the scan.  But there were no such areas in the neighborhood where the Milsteins were living.

The great news is that when you are searching for one family, you very likely will find another that you are searching for.  I possibly located the Grupitsky's and the Shutter's while searching this precinct and I had not perviously found them in the 1900 census.  Their surnames were horribly transcribed, but the dates of birth line up with the children in the families.

It takes time.  It's not easy.  But those old city directories give us a house number and a street name and they can and do often line up with what is in the census.

Now - you won't have this luck with Cotopaxi!  There were no street names written in the margins.  No house numbers assigned.  I don't think there were any in 1900.  It simply was the McCoy double house, The Hendricks house....they were called by the owners name.  But then, Cotopaxi didn't have quite the population that Denver had!!!

I have concluded that the Saul Ber Milstein family was missed in the 1900 census.  But who knows, maybe one day I will find them!  They did have a farm in Golden (but I didn't find them in the Golden Census) until at least 1897.  I have found all of their children in the 1900 census and did not find them within several ages of each child.   Lots of families back then lived close to children, so there's another place you can hunt for someone.

How thorough is your research?  How in-depth do you go?  To what length do you try to find someone before you put that aspect on hold?  And like I've said before, keep returning to the subject because new records are always being added to the digitized collections, new records are being found, and fellow researchers might have found exactly what you are looking for!

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