A Great New Discovery!

I learned something new yesterday! I already knew that often in the 1920 & 1930 censuses, if you were lucky, the census taker scrawled the name of the street he was working on next to the families who lived there. If they lived in a city or town, and if the census taker remembered that he was supposed to do that.

I was looking at the 1930 census for my mother's hometown of Marysville, Kansas, for someone whose great-grandmother lived there at that time. When I had found the great-grandmother, I scrolled on down the census to the bottom of the page, and there was my mother's oldest sister, her husband, and their infant daughter--my cousin Laura Lee! I mentioned it to the lady for whom I was doing the lookup, and she thought maybe my family had known hers. My mother and all of her siblings have been gone for quite a while now, and I doubt Laura Lee would remember much about living in Marysville since they came to Oregon somewhere before 1936 when the rest of the family migrated. The lady asked what street they were on. I enlarged the census as big as I could get it, then tilted sideways to read the street scrawled along the side. Laramie Street! Then I noticed another column of numbers to the right, and next to the ones I was already familiar with that read "Dwelling Number" and "Family Number." It read "House Number if in Cities or Towns" (or something like that). Whoo-Hoo! I had addresses for my family in Marysville! Who knew!

Well, some of you may have already known this, but for me it was a New Discovery!

I opened up my Microsoft Streets program (since Googlemaps was taking its own sweet time loading), located Marysville, and the street this lady's great-grandmother lived on as well as my mother & her parents and remaining siblings. My aunt and family and the great-grandmother lived on Laramie St., while my mother & parents etc., lived one block over on Jenkins St. What fun! Next I'm going to locate the remaining members of my grandparents' family still in Marysville, since this thoughtful census taker followed his instructions to the letter by including house numbers, too! Give it a try! Then if you ever happen to visit the old home town, you'll have a place to go!