Elizabeth For your first question, people living at the same address, could it be a boarding house? There were lots of them in DC in those days. If you see more than two or three people with different last names, that is a clue. In later census years, "boards" was added after the names at times. For your second question, if you find this person on the census, it will note if he was illiterate (after 1850). Some of my ancestors could sign their names and did on some documents, yet on later ones they made their marks. I was told that impatient clerks didn't want to wait for a perhaps painfully-written signature and filled it in themselves and asked for the "mark" as proof the man was there when he, the clerk, wrote it out in his superior penmanship. If the document is a will, the signer might have been too ill to write but could manage to do an "X". JHall