In the Census

Oh boy, sometimes those census records can really throw you for a loop. Sometimes they might even change the entire way you think about a family you are researching. There is never a family that confused me more than the Mays family. Any Mays researcher out there will agree with me. They are hard to pin down! This week I’m going to spotlight Rebecca Mays, for sheer stubbornness!

1850 United States Census

In the 1850 Census, everything seems fine. Nothing out of the ordinary here. We won’t even go into the fact that I don’t believe I have ever found a document that states William Mays Jr was the son of William Mays Sr. Especially since I know from watching many webinars that sometimes the Sr and Jr were added by enumerators if there was an older and younger man of the same name living near each other. I’ll get to that in my Do-Over when it’s time to stress over that! This census is important because it’s the earliest one that is going to give me ages of the children closest to the birth. This is especially important for Rebecca, who is aged 9 in this census.

1860 United States Census

This is where Rebecca starts to play with our minds a little bit. Between 1850 and 1860, William and Rebecca swapped places in the birth order. Things don’t get any better as the years go. To save space, I made us a chart of the family through the years.

The Mays Family in the Census

For the chart, I decided to leave blank spaces when children left the household. I was hoping it would help give a clear view of the family group and it did! 1870 was really a crazy census year for the Mays family. The oldest 4 children had left the household, no big deal. Then there is Rebecca. Oh, Rebecca. She managed to gain 3 years between 1850 and 1860, which actually isn’t that unusual for census ages. It’s between 1860 and 1870 that Rebecca clearly found the Fountain of Youth! She only aged 2 years in that time! When you look ahead to 1880, you can see Rebecca’s age actually goes back to what her age would have been if she’d stayed consistent through her lifetime.

Sidenote: I see you appearing out of nowhere Jane! Or is it Elizabeth J. Mays pulling a fast one like her sister Rebecca. I just don’t know anymore!

It wasn’t an indexing error.

Those of us with a few genealogy years under our belt might say that it could be a transcription error in 1870. That maybe it was just really hard to read and so it looks like 18 but was actually 28.

Nope, it sure is clearly saying Rebecca is 18 years old. Oh, Rebecca. I appreciate you and all your age games!

Previous 52 Ancestors posts:

• 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Longevity

I thought long and hard about how I would interpret the prompt this week. I was going to do the longest living male and female. Then I was going to do the longest married couple. Thinking about all those tempted me to look in my old file, so I decided right then and there I was going to poke around my current Do-Over file and see what jumped out at me.

Mary Jane Mays-Jegley

Aunt Janie was my Grandpa Stanley’s half-sister. Aunt Janie stood out to me because at the current part of my Do-Over I am trying to untangle the online theories about her father and his parents. That’s a story for a different day. I’m here to spotlight Janie. She is the daughter of William Harmon Mays and Sarah Elizabeth McDaniels. I’ve talked about them a few times. Here is their marriage record and this is a timeline of William’s life. I also talked about a census entry for Sarah in 1910 that had me curious. More on that later as well. She was born in September of 1906 in Rowan County, Kentucky. After her mother’s early passing, she moved to Clermont County with her father and paternal grandparents.

That is 94 miles away from any other family that they had. That is a massive distance in the early 1900s, especially for rural farmers who didn’t have much. I don’t know what prompted the family to move. It does seem that there was plenty of sicknesses going around at the time, but I haven’t been able to research fully to know if there was an increased death rate in the area. To move so far, so completely away from everyone, it must have been something though.

After moving to Clermont County, William hired Iva Belle Moyer to look after Janie and he eventually married her. Janie married George Jegley in January of 1928 in Clermont County and they had a son. My Grandma didn’t write down all of Janie’s descendants, so I’m going to have a heck of a time finding them all, but I hope they all know how much my mother’s family loved her. I haven’t heard anyone speak an ill word of Aunt Janie.

From what I can tell, Janie was close with her brothers and her sister in law, Emogene. She often wrote letters to Emogene… but more on that later. 😉

Longevity

Aunt Janie lived to be 93 years, 7 months, and 1 day old. She currently has the longest lifespan in my family tree file of 480 people. In addition to that, she outlived the average female lifespan in my database by close to 30 years and the longest living male in my database by 7 years.

Previous 52 Weeks Ancestors:

• Start: Emogene Taylor
• Favorite Photo: William and Llewellyn Moore