The 1885 census - it's such a mess!

Here's what I will show you in this blog about searching census records:

1)  Some websites skip a column or page from a census when indexing it
2)  Some websites have much better scans of images than other websites
3)  People who read the handwriting and typed it in made a lot of mistakes - some rather significant
4)  Be sure to compare the sex of a person, the date of birth, and the order of the family
5)  Find a relative or neighbor of your family first, then use that to find your family living close by
6)  Remember that at the turn of the century, a lot of families moved/lived together in clusters.
7)  Take your time - what you are looking for is probably there!

First off....there is no 1885 census for Fremont County.  But there is!  The story goes that someone found an alphabetized list of the 1885 Census tucked up in the top of the rafters of a basement somewhere here in town.  And that list is at the local history center.  So if you want to see if a person lived here in 1885, you can do that.  But it doesn't show what family they were living with or who their neighbors were....it's just an alphabetical list.  It has never been transcribed so you won't find it anywhere except by visiting the local history center!

I have used it to prove that none of the Cotopaxi Colonists were here in 1885.  Neither was Saltiel, Hart, Tobias or Schwarz.

But the bigger mess is Denver and how ancestry.com and familysearch.org have failed us in the digitization and indexing of names.  While I am using the families who were at Cotopaxi in my example, you can use the process for any name, any year, any location.

I first found the Shames family living downtown Denver in the 1885 census at ancestry:

I took this image, put it into photoshop, converted it to a "stamp" and could finally see that it was:

Isaac Shames with his daughters Rachel Shames and Nettie Washington.  And I already knew from the Cotopaxi documents that Isaac had a daughter married to Joe Washington (later shortened to Washer).

Ancestry had transcribed this as:

This is on the bottom left of page 42, Arapahoe County, District 5 if you subscribe to ancestry and want to look it up.

I found his 2 brothers, S. Malsten and B. Muhlstein above him.

I felt that the Colonists probably lived close together in Denver, so I started looking at pages on this census before and after the Shames/Milstein family.  In the next column on this page, I found the Krupitsky, Prezant and Toplitsky families.

Krupitsky had been transcribed as Ruhhitsky.  (OK, trust me, this did not all happen on the same day!  I have been working on this for the last 10 years!!)

Prezant - transcribed as Trissoml 

Toplitsky - transcribed as Tehiock

It takes patience....and great skill to really understand the 1885 census!

I'm going to use Prezant as my example here.  After taking the image and working on it in Photoshop, I was pretty sure the surname was Priscrant.  And it is clear enough on the first names:

Chas, age 30

Carrie, age 28

Joseph, age 11

Sarah, age 7 7/12.

I had already found their ship's manifest:

Here they were transcribed as:

Zattel Breisand, age 28, born 1854
Kele Breisand, age 26, born 1856
Itzag Breisand, age 8, born 1874
Hirsch Breisand, age not given, presumed to be a newborn, so given a date of 1882.

And I had found them in the 1900 census in Denver as:

Charles Prezant, age 45
Clara Prezant, age 43
Sarah Prezant, age 15, born Nov 1885
Etta Prezant, age 14, born Mar 1886
Nettie Prezant, age 11, born Sep 1888
Belle Prezant, age 9, born Aug 1890
Rosa Prezant, age 8, born 1892
Jessie Prezant, age 2, born Sep 1897
Abrie Prezant, age 4, born Oct 1895
Eda Prezant, age 1, born Jul 1898

Clara stated that she had given birth to 14 children, 9 were still living.  Eight were still living at home.  Their oldest son, Joseph, was married and living next door to Michael Shames and his family in Weld County.  They were all farmers.  In the 1900 Census, Joseph is age 26, making him born about 1873.


That makes him age 11 in 1885.  That lines up with Joseph in the 1885 Census above, and Itzag, age 8, in 1882 on the ship's manifest.  But where is Hirsch?  And notice, Clara could not have had a child born in Nov 1885 and another born in Mar 1886!   Read the census!!!

All of these records came from ancestry.com.  Next, I wanted to see what was on familysearch.org.  So I took a look there and wow!  What a difference in the scans of the census!  Familysearch is so much better!!!



That's Isaac Shames, and his daughters Rachel and Nettie.  Transcribed as Shamus and Warsburger.

 I could not find the Presents by searching. I found them by simply looking at column 2 on this page:

Familysearch skipped the entire right hand column of this page when they transcribed the census!  Not a single family will show up when you do a search!  The only way to find these families is to "know" where to look - you find them in ancestry first, then go to familysearch to look at the better scan!  What a pain!!!

So how many people have missed finding their families because they do not go page by page looking for them?

How many people can't find a family because of the transcription of a surname?

I grew up in a fairly small farming community in Indiana and a long time ago, I went through the 1930 census and corrected the spelling of all the surnames for that township.  Because I knew how the names were spelled.  And for such a small community, I couldn't believe the number of surnames that had been incorrectly typed.  I could read them clearly, but someone who did not know what the names were....I could see how they could get it wrong just by looking at handwriting and not knowing what the name was.  It was a fascinating lesson in research for me!

So take Denver in the 1885 census and these are Yiddish speaking Russian Germans.  No wonder the names were handwritten the way they were....and then the person who indexed these had to simply guess at what the letters in the handwriting were - especially when you look at the poorly scanned image on ancestry.

And yes - ancestry and family search have different transcriptions of what the surname is.  The records were independently transcribed by each agency and they simply do not match up!

I have found things on ancestry that I cannot find on other websites.  And vice versa.  That's why I look at the census and read it line by line.  Yes - it takes an incredible amount of time.  But I have found things that no one else can find.  And now, you know why!!!

Next up - a closer look at the Prezant family.

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