Month: March 2012

A Pleasant Surprise

Posted on by Kathleen
Probate Court, Clermont County, Ohio, “Marriages, 1801-1910”, 1881, p. 516, no 299, Lafayette Moyer-Mollie Howell;

One of the reasons I haven’t been posting much is because I’ve been catching up on my family file cleanup. It’s been going really well. I’m onto the Moyer line of my family tree. I’ve also been soaking up the Ohio, County Marriage and Birth images that were added to FamilySearch. At first I wasn’t going to do new research into Daniel Moyer‘s (my 3rd great grandfather) brother. I know he had siblings, and I knew I’d get back around to it, but I couldn’t help myself with these county marriages. What would a little search hurt right?

Well, I found Henry Moyer up to the 1880 census. I know he had two children, Emma and Lafayette. I was having problems finding the children after they left their father’s house. For Lafayette it would be the 1900 census and Emma the 1880. As you all know, the girls take a little more leg work. Well, I found Lafayette in the marriage records as you can see above. However, it was a pleasant surprise to also find that Henry Moyer, appeared with the couple. This is the first time I’ve actually had a parent appear with the child. Lafayette was well over the age of consent (21), so that wasn’t the reason why.

I think what I want to do is learn more about the marriage records from the 1800’s and figure out what little surprises like this could actually mean about the family.

The Census and the Presidency

Posted on by Kathleen

I have a little fun sometimes, and I look up United States Presidents in the census. Don’t try to tell me you haven’t! In fact, I look up a lot of people in the census, not just presidents. This entry isn’t about them though, it’s about the presidents aspect.

Here are some interesting things I’ve learned about past presidents through the census.

  • Even though George Washington didn’t die until 1799 and was president at the time of the 1790 census, I was unable to find him on the census. There were only two George Washingtons that came up in both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch searches. One lived in Massachusetts and the other in South Carolina. I’ll forgive our first president though, he was kind of busy at the time. You know forming a government and a little ol’ place called Washington D.C.

Also, am I the only one out there who wishes they could go back in time and just get a peek at Washington D.C. before all those monuments were built? Or maybe to see the White House and Capitol building but have nothing else be there? How strange would that be?

  • Martin van Buren was the eighth president but the first one to appear on the 1850 census, well actually the first president in the chronological list. He was joined in the 1850 census by fourteen other future and current presidents. Including a posthumous Zachary Taylor and his vice president Millard Fillmore.
  • A fun fact is if you happen to come across the presidents, there are usually arrows pointing to them in the margins!

Just from the 1850 census (no other outside influences), I learned that two presidents are the sons of ministers, Chester A Arthur and Grover Cleveland. Two presidents listed their post-presidency occupations as farmers: Martin Van Buren and John Tyler. There were many variations of pre-presidency occupations, Lawyer (Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B Hayes), Farmer (James Buchanan), Congressman (Andrew Johnson), and Army (Ulysses S Grant).

This obviously leads me to the 1940 census and what presidents should be on them. If you don’t keep count like me (because I’m weird), there should be eleven, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H W Bush. No president appears for the first time in the 1940 census, but a lot of them are becoming of age. So there should be some interesting details to be had!

The president at the time of the 1940 census was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He happens to be one of my Mom’s favorite presidents. Not because she lived during his time, but because she was always fascinated by him as a person. Some celebrities who could possibly be making their first census appearance are Tom Brokaw, Smokey Robinson, Peter Fonda, and Chuck Norris.

Who do you look for in the census as a guilty pleasure?