Using multiple census records to prove your family.

Yesterday, I blogged about the Prezant family and to make it easier, I put their information into a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets make it so easy to compare dates, names and places.  When you look at them across the line, you can quickly point out any obvious errors, such as the fact that Sarah and Etta could not have been born 6 months apart - and that was corrected in the 1910 census.

And that Hirsch is not in the 1885, 1900 or 1910 census. He must have died before 1885.

Next, I went in search of a ship's arrival manifest.  There was a list made when they got on the ship in Europe, and one made when they arrived in New York City.  Found this:

which was transcribed as this:

Yet when magnified (and put into photoshop with even more filters)

I can see the first name as possibly a spelling of Zallel, i.e., Zallael and the last name looking more like Br....ant...Brnerantt or Breisantt.  (Can you see how this later turned int Prezant?)

Nel - could easily be Kel - look at how her first name transitioned in these few short years.

And they have "Mary" as a male age 8.  Yet I can clearly see Itzag.  Can you?

Horrih - easily Hirsch.

(I should point out that Charles was a common Americanization of the Jewish name Zallel.)

So let's add a new column to the spreadsheet to include the arrival manifest:

Pretty sure we have a match.  They arrived June 17, 1882, and Hirsch was 10/12 months old at that time.  They immediately left for Cotopaxi.  So what happened to Hirsch as he is not listed in the 1885 census.

Carol Friedman is a descendant of this line and she has done extensive research and has not found information on Hirsch.  I have not found any other descendants who have information on him.

Because of the huge range of possible spellings of the surname between 1882 and 1885, it would be nearly impossible to search the Denver cemetery lists.

So the questions will remain unanswered for future researchers.  Hirsch must have died sometime between June 1882 and June 1885.  Was he buried at Cotopaxi?   We do not know.

I found a Charles Prizent living at 369 Larimer St in the 1884 city directory.  Same name in the 1885 directory as a "ragman".  Did not locate him in the 1883 city directory.  So if Hirsch died while in Cotopaxi, it would have been within a year of arrival.

Just to share with you how much a Yiddish/Russian/German surname changed between 1882 and 1930 here's what we have for this family:

Breisand - ship's departure manifest

Bonerannt - ship's arrival manifest

Prizent - 1884/1885 Denver city directories

Trissoml - 1885 census

Prezant - 1900 census

Rrezant - 1910 census

Prezont - 1920 census

Poezant - 1930 census

Some of these are obvious typing errors, others can be shown as transcription errors.  It is so hard to read old handwriting.  But it is so worth it in the long run!!  At least I've clarified this much for future researchers.

Hirsch Prezant.  1881 to pre 1885.  Hopefully one day we will learn more about him.  Until then....may his memory be a blessing.

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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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