There were index cards created for each child under the age of 10 as well as the head of the household in which they lived. I've not seen, much less used, the LDS CD, but I have used the microfilm rolls of the 1880 Census Soundex for Arkansas and was lucky enough to find the children I was looking for living with their Grandmother and their father in their grandmother's house. This info confirmed half of a family legend I used to begin my search for them in this location and it contradicted part of the same family legend. This demonstrated for me just how legends may contain nuggets of truth interspersed with half remembered truths or tales twisted by the handing down through the generations. Legend had it these children were raised by a great aunt after their father left the family divorcing his wife. Actually, he married a divorce' who gave birth to his two children and then divorced him to marry later a third man. He took the children out of state from where they had lived and went to his mother's farm. She was widowed by 1880 and he was the only man in the house at the time of the census. The fact her name had changed after she had him meant I would never have found her without the Soundex Index cards for her grandchildren. These microfilmed index cards listed the father and grandmother and the relationships of each to the head of the house, the grandmother. So, it was a beautiful find. I can't say enough good things about the Soundex! But it was limited to U.S. Census Records of 1880, 1900, and 1920; and for some states, 1910 also; and, of course, to children under the age of 10. Wes Coleman ----- Original Message ----- From: <RCFamHist@aol.com> To: <NCEDGECO-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 6:37 PM Subject: Re: [NCEDGECO] 1880 census CD > Bonnie, > The same can be said for any index -- the original handwriting has to be > interpreted and sometimes it gets mangled by those not already familiar with > the family. What is great about the 1880 everyname census is all the > creative ways you can search -- with wildcards, first names, by county, by > state or the whole US in one search. If you know the names of their > neighbors you can search for them and then look at the neighbors. You > mentioned a way of searching - by an unusual first name - that cannot be done > using the 1880 soundex that is indexed by head of household for only those > households with children under the age of 10. If only all the other census > indexes were created the same as the 1880! > > Rebecca > > In a message dated 8/23/01 5:11:56 PM Central Daylight Time, > brs1@mediaone.net writes: > > << Word of warning on the 1880 census from LDS - I purchased my own copy of > the CD set, and tried to look up a family I had already located, as a > test of the index. It took some doing to find them on the CD. I had to > resort to searching for a given name in the family that was unusual, > without the surname, which was so badly misread I never would have found > it in their index. This happened in varying degrees with a few surnames > I searched for. So, if you don't locate your family immediately on the > CD's, be very, very creative with your search of the index. > > Bonnie > >> >

Hello All, I am a very experienced census researcher. I purchased one of the first sets of the 1880 Census CD set that was sold at the NGS conference in Portland in May. So far, I have found about 30 individuals, that I would never have found with the Soundex. These were people who did not have children under 10 years of age in their household, or who had moved totally out of the area where I expected to find them. All indexes, whether published in books, or the soundex have errors. I looked for my great-grandfather in the Illinois soundex for two years. His name was Winfield Scott Van Horne. Van Horne codes to V565. I went through that index at least five different times. Then one day I went through it forward, nothing, then backward, nothing. As I sat there looking at the three index cards on the screen, I had the last card from the previous section and the two header cards for V565, I realized the last card from the previous section said Winfield Scott Van Horne, and the other people on the card were my family. My Van Hornes had been coded V560 for Van HOME. The irony of all this was that my great-grandfather had been the census taker for that section of Champaigne county, and his signature was on every page. And by the way, my family is properly coded in the new CD version of the 1880 census. This census set is 55 CD's, and contains every name in the census. The 1880 Soundex only includes those households with children under 10 year of age. It is a marvelous tool, when properly used by people with realistic expectations. I have other ancestors with the surname Congleton. You folks should see what the census takers could do with that name, and that's before the makers of indexes got into the act. Marleen Van Horne