Hi, One good thing about modern inventions. In the 1980 census in NYC records were water soaked due to a fire. The Fed then had them carefully collect to "freeze dry" them. In this way some of the records were saved. ---OmahaMom@aol.com wrote: > > The federal government has taken censuses every ten years since 1790, although > no all of the ones taken are still in existance (some parts have been lost). > The biggest loss was the 1890 census which suffered water damage after a fire. > (There's 3 reels worth of miscellaneous stuff that survived, and a veteran's & > widow's schedule from mid Kentucky on back in the alphabet...supposed to have > been only Civil War Union Vets & widows, but others were also enumerated by > zealous census takers...it's better than absolutely nothing.) > The 1880 one you ran across on line was probably 1880...a transcription. I > caution folks on transcriptions because even with careful transcribing, they > can misspell, misidentify families, so if you can find your folks on it > great--use it as a reference to the real thing to see if you can find out > anything additional (sometimes you can learn a lot.), and if you can't, go > look at the real thing. If they alphabetize the transcription, you lose their > place in the community, and we are often advised to look ten to twenty > families either side of our families, because in another ten to twenty years, > many of them will also turn out to be related by marriage. You can also get a > feel for the handwriting of the day, and sometimes recognize your ancestor's > name when someone else transcribing it might think it looked like something > else. (A marriage transcription put one of my ancestors as Conner when it > should have been Comer...a much less common, nearly unknown name in many > areas...easy to overlook when it happens that way.) > Sometimes you may find that a relative was actually the one who wrote the > census in question, and you have pages of his handwriting as a memento. > > What I am saying is that we need to remember that transcriptions are secondary > sources of original records and we need to treat them as such. Great finding > aids, and guides to the real records. > > Karen > > > ==== GenTips Mailing List ==== > Support online research! Donate to the RootsWeb Genealogical Project! See more information at: > http://www.rootsweb.com > > > > > > _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com