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.