Try This Tool to Find a Missing Census

When a search doesn't find your relative in the census, there is a tool that can help.

It's been 7 years since they released the 1940 United States Federal Census. And I still can't find a handful of my relatives. I've tried searching for them a bunch of ways. No luck!

Locate the group of census pages you need.

If only I could go page-by-page through what I think was their neighborhood. Luckily, there's a tool to help us do that.

Computer professional Stephen P. Morse decided to make genealogy searches easier. His collection of tools focuses on the census (U.S., Canada, and U.K.), ship manifests, DNA, and more.

His Unified Census ED (Enumeration District) Finder helps you find the census pages for a particular address. Then you can start paging through the collection.

Let's walk through an example. My great aunt Edie married in 1936, but I've never found her in the 1940 census. Her marriage certificate says she and her husband-to-be lived 2½ blocks apart in the Bronx, New York. When I was a little girl, they lived next door to my grandmother. That building is between both of their 1936 addresses. I'll start my search there.

4 steps to narrow down your search for the right census page.

In the Stephen Morse tool I can enter a street address and it's smart enough to offer me the short list of cross streets. I can click a link to open Google Maps to that address to see which streets are near this address. Since this is a city address, I can enter several cross streets. I have the option of entering the 1930 enumeration district for this address if I have it (which I do). But we're already narrowed down to a single enumeration district as a result.

Click a button to find an address on the map and see its cross streets.

Where to locate the enumeration district 
on a U.S. Federal census sheet.

To find the enumeration district for an address, look at the top right corner of any Federal census sheet. You should see the supervisor's district and the enumeration district numbers.

Click the result link, then choose where you want to view the census pages. I'll go with Ancestry.com. In this case, my neighborhood of interest is part of a 26-page collection. I can focus on the names—particularly on the first names—and try to find my great aunt, her husband, and her daughter.

I found a military record that makes me think my great uncle was away from home in 1940. I'll concentrate on my great aunt and her daughter's first names. And I'll keep in mind that my great aunt went by at least 4 variations of her first name.

I've gone through these 26 pages a few times without finding my great aunt Edie. My grandparents, my great grandparents, and some cousins are in these 26 pages. But not the great aunt I'm looking for!

If my great uncle was away, were my great aunt and her baby staying with or near her mother-in-law? I can use the Stephen Morse website to search for that address, too. I'll follow the same steps as before:

1. Choose the right census year
2. Enter an address
3. Click to view the map and find cross streets
4. Start searching the pages

My great aunt's mother-in-law lived about a block away, but she was part of a different set of census pages. The Stephen Morse tool narrows down my search to 2 enumeration districts. One has 43 pages; the other has 32.

Side-note: I have so many relatives who lived in the Bronx, I'm seeing lots of familiar names on these pages. It helps to keep your family tree open to see if you need the page where you've found another relative.

I'm sorry to say I struck out and did not find my great aunt. But I found lots of people I know, like my Uncle Silvio as a little boy. I even found the guy my mom was once engaged to!

This is a good method that's worth trying. I'm going to pick another missing relative and try again.

And speaking of censuses:

• How To Squeeze Everything Out of the Census
• Simplify Your Genealogy Info Gathering With This Form
• 3 Unique, Key Facts about Every U.S. Federal Census

4 Types of Family Tree Errors Only You Can Find

Place names are a big challenge in your family tree. Can you improve yours?

I'm working on a new family tree project that I hope to share with you soon. My goal is to create visualizations of my family tree like you've never seen before.

I'm preparing the data for this project, going through long spreadsheets almost one line at a time.

But I discovered something along the way. In fact, I discovered lots of things: errors that no software tool can find for me. They're human errors that are obvious only to the human that made the errors. Me!

What I had was a very long list of every address or state or country in my family tree, and each name associated with it. As I scrolled through the list, I saw my mistakes: I had people associated with places I know they've never been.

It's easy to click the wrong suggested place. Time to find those errors.

1st Error Type: Wrong Selection

Family Tree Maker is great about suggesting place names as you type. Each time I start to type "Italy" I see the next suggestion is a place called Italy Cross in Canada. And I did it. I accidentally associated two 18th century Italians with Italy Cross, Canada by mistake. I made a similar mistake with a couple that lives in Argentina. Who even knew there was a place called Argentina, Alajuela, Costa Rica?

2nd Error Type: What Was I Thinking?

I had another man from Pennsylvania associated with Hamilton, Bermuda. It's marked as a departure, citing the New York Passenger Lists as a source. But there's no date, no image, and no travel companion. It seems like a complete mistake. And since this man is the father of an ex-in-law, I'm deleting the whole fact.

3rd Error Type: Inconsistency

I also spotted a style error. My standard for U.S. addresses is to spell out the word County. For example: 328 Superior Street, Youngstown, Mahoning County, Ohio, USA. In the long list of places in my family tree, I saw a couple scroll by that were missing the word County. It may not be a big deal, but I'd rather have it be right.

4th Error Type: Stragglers

While looking for an example of a place name missing the word County, I found another type of error. An address belonging to no one. It probably belonged to someone who used to be in my tree. But I've decided to limit the scope of some far-flung branches. Because I deleted a lot of people, I may have a bunch of straggling place names like 17 Halls Heights Avenue.

The people are gone, but their addresses linger on.

To find these types of errors in your family tree, you can start by browsing the list of places you've used. Family Tree Maker has a Places tab. RootsMagic has a Place List. I don't use FamilySearch, but I don't see a lot of control options there.

Do any places stand out as being odd to you? I ran the Family Tree Maker Place Usage Report to generate a list, but it doesn't include places that have no people associated with them.

Add this task to your Rainy Day Genealogy List or your I'm Bored Genealogy List. It's another effort that'll make your family tree that much stronger.

And speaking of fact-checking:

• How to Spot and Fix a Big Mistake in Your Family Tree
• How Is That Possible?
• Case Study On 'How Is That Possible?'

Did I Find a Scandal in My Family Tree?

If the people involved are long gone, a scandalous story should be OK to share. Don't you think?

I've read thousands of birth, marriage, and death records in my family tree research. They're mostly in Italian and from the 1800s.

This was flagged as an error, but, unfortunately, it's correct.

In my tiny ancestral hometowns, a few babies were born out of wedlock each year. Sometimes the birth record names the mother, but not the father. Most of the time it doesn't name either one. Only the midwife knows who gave birth to the baby.

Doesn't that seem like it should have been a huge scandal in the early 1800s? Especially for the woman who admits to having a child out of wedlock. But it happened every year. That's just the way it was.

Yesterday, after making a ton of edits to my Family Tree Maker file, I thought I'd better check it for errors. I exported my GEDCOM file and tested it with Family Tree Analyzer. It's a free program with a ton of powerful tools.

What a lifesaver that program is. It found some mysterious duplicate fact entries I didn't know were there. It found a woman, all by herself, connected to no one. She was a forgotten remnant of a marriage I'd decided to delete from my family tree.

But the most interesting thing Family Tree Analyzer found may be a deep, dark family secret.

This baby was born just a little too long after his father died.

Pasquale Cormano was born on 21 November 1811, a full 10 months after his father died. The death record of his father, also named Pasquale, shows he died on 27 January 1811. Another copy of the record, written for his grandson's marriage in 1841, confirms that death date.

That supposed 10-month pregnancy made me look more closely at all the documents. It was baby Pasquale's uncle, Leonardo Cormano, who presented the baby to the mayor when he was born. That's normal when the father of the baby is dead or unable to bring the baby himself.

It was traditional to name a baby after their father if he died before the baby was born. If the dead man's child was a girl, she got a feminized version of her dead father's name. Like Pasquala, Giuseppa, or Giovanna. When Pasquale Cormano's widow, Maria Saveria Paradiso, gave birth that 21st day of November, she named the baby Pasquale after her late husband.

But…are we to believe that Maria Saveria and her husband had relations as late as the day of his death? And that the baby was in utero for a whole extra month?

Was something scandalous happening when this man was about to die?

I checked out the baby's "Uncle Leo" Cormano. He was a few years older than his brother Pasquale. And when he died, 13 years after baby Pasquale was born, he had never married. He was a 54-year-old contadino—a man who worked the land.

The mother of this miracle baby, Maria Saveria, was a young mother of two when her husband died. When she finally gave birth to little Pasquale, she was 25 years old with 2 toddlers and an infant.

Isn't it easily possible that the ill-fated Pasquale was not the father of the baby? Isn't it intriguing to think that "Uncle Leo" may have been more involved than it seems?

So, what happened after baby Pasquale was born to a dead father? In 1814, widow Maria Saveria had 3 children, ages 7, 6, and almost 3 years old. That's when she married a widower named Giovanni Palmieri. The year before, Giovanni's 9-year-old daughter died, leaving him with 5 young children.

It's hard to imagine that their marriage, creating a household of 8 children, was a better option. But they each needed a partner to help raise the children and keep a house.

Ten years after Maria Saveria and Giovanni married, "Uncle Leo" died alone. Maria Saveria lost her 2nd husband in 1831 when she was 45. By then, another of Giovanni's children had died, the older children were married, and only her 3 Cormano children were still with her.

You know what that means, don't you? I have to search for Maria Saveria's third marriage!

What will a routine check of your family tree file reveal?