Rummaging through some old notes in my quest to get organized, I stumbled across a photocopy of an 1870 Census record of Christiansburg, Virginia. I found it while doing work for my undergraduate Historical Methods course. The census list, of course, was hand-written at the time, and while the person(s) who did the census for this particular town were meticulous in filling out the categories properly, the entry for one family, the Rose family, struck me as very interesting, and quite funny. Under the category “occupation”, the census-taker, instead of listing occupations for the individual family members, wrote this across all the family’s field:
These people live in a cabin like hogs almost naked and without furniture or clothing and perfectly ignorant.
Because southwest Virginia in 1870 was poor (and, compared to the rest of the state, still poor), this isn’t suprising. What suprised me at the time was that, despite a number of people in the area having as their occupation “nothing,” this was the only family for which the census-taker wrote a more “descriptive” statement. It marks a brief point at which the personality or the experience of the census-taker, and the lives of the subjects, comes out in the census itself, and makes a seemingly impersonal bureaucratic resource more “human” in some way.
I can imagine the encounter from the way the census-taker wrote the information. Unlike most of the other families, the census-taker did not write the members of the Rose family in order by age. I would speculate that he couldn’t get that information from them, either because he couldn’t understand what they were saying or that they themselves didn’t know their own ages. Three of family members’ ages were marked out and rewritten, perhaps suggesting that the census-taker or the family members couldn’t decide on the exact age. If the census-taker estimated their ages, then it makes sense that they are out of order. This was a family of ten people, and I can imagine them coming in and out of the census-takers view, making the process of putting them in order more difficult. It also seems that the census-taker’s handwriting is much more sloppy in the final few family member entries, suggesting to me that the census-taker was stressed or annoyed or otherwise wanting the episode to end as quickly as possible.
Of course I’m speculating on most (if not all) of this. I certainly wouldn’t publish this kind of analysis in a book or article, for I would surely be criticized for it. But it does seem useful to imagine how an event or encounter occurred based on some insights and speculations. We discussed this a little in our Documentary class, mostly in relation to Simon Schama. Paula suggested, and I agreed, that speculating about the past is a productive way to ask new questions and think about the past in a different way. I’ve always found it difficult to use census material, but imagining its subjects in the way I imagined the encounter with the Rose family gives the census a new perspective. It’s a useful tool for seeing how communities lived, what kind of people lived near each other, what kinds of jobs they had, et cetera. It’s much harder, however, to build human lives out of those relatively brief entries. Every time I look at the census (and lately I’ve been looking often), I’m always struck by how little I will actually ever know about the lives so monotonously categorized in the census. It’s always fun to find out more about those lives, whether in little snippets found within the Census itself or, as is usually the case, in other sources. Since finding that photocopy I’ve been imagining the conversation the census-taker had with that family.
Nearly a third of a century ago I was a research associate at Ted Hershberg’s Philadelphia Social History Project, now long defunct. It was an attempt to collate information from census enumerator books [1850-1880], from street and business directories, and from a geographical grid and to represent it all in machine readable form. For three years I worked nearly every day with enumerator sheets and often I would, like you, try to imagine what the lives of the individuals whose statistics were recorded there were like. None of the entries I saw were as dramatic as the one you referenced, but they were evocative nonetheless. Your post, like Proust’s madeline, stirred waves of memory. Thank you.
You’re welcome, Dale. That class was my first introduction to census records, which I initially found most unenjoyable because of the bad legibility and even worse microfilm reader we had on campus. Finding that entry not only helped me reassess my opinion of census records, it also reinvigorated my interest in history in general.
Jeremy, while you may have had to fight with a microfilm reader to access the 1870 census manuscript, that is no longer necessary. In fact, you can read the Rose entry now in the comfort of your own home, as I just did, and at no cost to you. All that is necessary is for you to have a library card with PIN, if using a public library, and for the library to subscribe to HeritageQuest Online among their resource databases. This database is used principally by genealogists, such as myself, and may not be a part of your own higher ed institution library’s on-line offerings.
The description of HeritageQuest Online at my local library reads as follows: “Images of the U. S. Federal Census, 1790-1930, plus over 25,000 volumes of family and local histories, full-text and searchable. Library & Home Use.” When I enter the site, there are four options, the first of which is “Search Census.” The second screen has a basic search which prompts me for surname, given name, census year and state. I entered “Rose, 1870, Virginia” and left the given name blank. The third screen gave me all the entries by county, although I also could have viewed them at the state-wide level if I so chose. Montgomery County had five entries, and from the ages given and your suggestion that there would be a large family, it was easy for me to select the eldest individual for examination. Each selection comes in page pairs, and your family was on Subpage B. The head of household was clearly listed as a basket weaver, and the “nothing” for occupation was the listing for the wife, where normally the occupation would have been “keeping house.” So, as I see it, “nothing” was the census taker’s comment on the housekeeping “gusto” shown by the woman of the house.
Perhaps the Rose family you found is mentioned in a genealogy which has been filmed by HeritageQuest. To find out, select “Search Books” in place of “Search Census,” and you will soon have the opportunity to enter the surname in the category of your choice. You will doubtless be presented with several pages of entries, but it is easy to scan the titles for a “Rose Genealogy.” You may then read or scan the book cover-to-cover, or use the book’s own index to pursue your quarry. Aside from HeritageQuest, you might consider searching the Rose surname message boards at genforum.genealogy.com and/or boards.ancestry.com — using either the given name or the place name as a search string. The possibilities are endless, but my point is that it’s now easier than ever to obtain information about specific individuals or families appearing in the 1870 census.