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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Shames - ha Levi?

I have seen numerous family trees on ancestry that state Isaac Shames, a Colonist, was Levite.

So my curiosity was aroused.....mostly because his 2 brothers never show that indicator.  His headstone on his grave does not say that he is, nor does it have the Levite symbol.

Could he be of the tribe of Levi?  Could he be Kohane - a descendant of Aaron?

Isaac Leib M Shames - his parents are Menashe Milstein and Ester Baer.   Flora Satt's thesis gives us this genealogy about Esther's relationship to Isaac Baer Levinsohn:

9. German Jew, author of Nathan der Wiese, leader of 18th Century Enlightenment. Although more famous for his literary and educational ideas than for his social or political theories, Baer Levinsohn is considered the fount of the Russian Neo-Hebraic Renaissance and the figurehead of the 19th century Jewish enlightenment. One of his nieces, Esther Baer, married Menashe Milstein of Brest Litovsk and proved to be a great influence in her husband's home city, a center of Hasidism. In turn, their son Jacob married Malka, the daughter of Rabbi Zalman of Zhitomir, 

So, going up from Isaac Shames we have:

Jacob Milstein (died 1861)
   married to Malta Zalman

Jacob's parents were:

Menace Milstein and Esther Baer

from there, I began googling books on Isaac Baer Levinsohn.  Also spelled Lowensohn.  He was a known as the "father of Haskala" - a form of Judaism.

I found this:

Isaac Baer Levinsohn was born September 2, 1788, in Kremenets, Volhynia into a well-to-do, prominent family.  His father Jehudah Levin, who carried on extensive business with the Polish landowners, knew Polish quite well.

So now, we know that Esther Baer is his niece and Jehudah (Judah) Levin is his father.   And I start filling in a blank family tree....sort of like a story board.  I use pink and blue stickies, write the names on them, and arrange them on a foam core board.  Then I plug it into a tree just like any gentile genealogist would do:

The same book tells me that Jehudah had a brother, Hayyim.

In another book, I find this:

Jekuthiel Solomon, the great-grandfather of Isaac Bar Levinsohn, who acquired considerable weath was a native of Kremenetz.  Levinsohn's grandfather, Isaac, his father-in-law, the wealthy and learned Zalman Cohen, and his father, Judah Levin, who also was a wealthy merchant and was equally popular among Jews and Gentiles, likewise lived there.

But I have a problem with how this is worded.  Levinsohn's father is Judah.

His grandfather is Isaac, who's father-in-law is Zalman Cohen.  But I need to verify that!

Found this at Wikipedia:

His father, Judah Levin, was a grandson of Jekuthiel Solomon, who settled in Kremenetz and acquired considerable wealth, and a son of Isaac, who had married the daughter of Zalman Cohen, famed for his wealth and scholarship. 

which shows us that Levinsohn's father is Judah Levin.

Judah Levin is the grandson of Jekuthiel Solomon.

Judah Levin's father is Isaac and Isaac married the daughter of Zalman Cohen.

This then becomes even more frustrating!  You only have 2 male grandparents and if his mother is the daughter of Zalman Cohen....that is one of his male grandparents.

Thus, his father's father would be Jekuthial Solomon - different surname from his father, Isaac.

And this does happen in Jewish genealogy.  Now, my stickies have been moved, and my "tree" looks like this:

The only way to make Esther Baer a niece of Isaac Baer Levinsohn is that he had a sister.  We don't know her given name and we will assume her maiden name is Levinsohn, so here is her ancestry, tying her into Isaac Baer Levinsohn's father, Judah Levin:

Thus we see that Isaac Lieb Milstein Shames descends from Judah Levin who descends from Isaac Levin, married to a Cohen.....and could well be a Levite.

But it would also mean that Saul Baruch Milstein and Benjamin Z Milstein also descend from the Levites and Cohens as well.  Right now, DNA can only test for Kohane...and there are many questions about the accuracy of the results.

This is how you put together a "family tree" when you don't have all the names.  And while this is perhaps not enough to say that this family is Kohane....I think we can safely say that "ha-Levi" is correct!

Sometime down the line, we'll look at Isaac Baer Levinsohn and his religious views and the possible impact on the Cotopaxi Colonists.  But I needed to do the family tree before I take a look at his influence on their beliefs.

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