Thursday, July 26, 2012

1940 U.S. Census - Looking for Grandmother Seaver

Ancestry.com just announced that the indexing for 12 more states in the 1940 U.S. Census has been completed, and the good news for me is that Massachusetts is one of the states.  Now I can find my grandmother!!!

Ooops... not exactly.  I've spent 30 minutes using all of my census search tricks looking for Alma Bessie (Richmond) Seaver (born 1882 in Connecticut), wife of Frederick W. Seaver (1876-1942), who resided in Leominster, Worcester County,Massachusetts in 1940.  No luck.  She's not there unless the enumeration or the indexing is horribly mangled.

I checked the index for all of her children, and found daughter Geraldine (with her father in Leominster), son Frederick (with his sister Ruth), daughter Ruth (Seaver) Fischer with her husband and daughter, daughter Evelyn (Seaver) Wood with her husband and three children in New Hampshire, and daughter Marion (Seaver) Braithwaite with her husband and daughter in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. I did not find an entry for son Edward R. Seaver, born 1913 in Massachusetts, either.

I did find that the indexing for my father in his sister's family is "interesting."  Here is a snippet of the entry:


*  Bowers A. Fischer is indexed as 'Boner A. Fisher' (and I can't really fault the indexing here, it clearly says 'Fisher,' although I would have indexed the first name as 'Boners')

*  Frederick W. Seaver is indexed as 'Frederick W. Lawon' (and I can't fault the indexing here for the last part of the name, but I would have indexed it as 'Sawon" - the first letter S is written inconsistently on the page).

So, did the enumerator miss my grandmother?  Did my grandfather intentionally leave her off the list for some reason when he gave the information?  Was she left off the enumeration because she was out of town visiting a sibling or a child or a friend?  I guess I'll never know.  She is apparently one of the 3% that were missed in the 1940 U.S. census.

When the FamilySearch index for Massachusetts becomes available, I will have to search it also in case Ancestry missed a page or completely messed up the indexing.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/07/1940-us-census-looking-for-grandmother.html

Copyright(c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

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