27 March 2006

Spellings all over the place

There is an 1860 census enumeration that lists four of my families on one page. The problem is that the last name is spelled differently for each household. Part of the problem in this case is the dialect the residents used, combined with the likely difficulty the census taker had figuring out how to spell the non-English names. It is always an excellent idea to consider as many variants as possible and to search pages manually if necessary. The entries for the Behrens family in Adams County, Illinois, can be seen here:

http://www.rootdig.com/census/claytontwp/

And if anyone is related, send me an email ;-)
Michael

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