Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- An Unexpected Record Find

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1)  Have you found an unexpected record recently (or at any time) in your genelaogy and family history research?  A document, a book, an article, a letter, etc. 

2)  This week, please tell us about that unexpected record find and how it helped your research.

2)  Share your unexpected record find and how it helped your research with us in your own blog post, writing a comment on this blog post, or put it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system.  Please leave a comment on this post so others can find it.

NOTE:  I could use ideas for different SNGF topics.  Please email me (randy.seaver@gmail.com).

Here's mine:

Recently, I was going through Ancestry Hints to Save to my tree for several ancestors, since the Ancestry AI Tools want to work on Ancestry records saved to an Ancestry Member Tree.

My person of interest was my 2nd great-grandfather, James Richmond (1821-1912) of Putnam, Connecticut. I knew that nhe had a farm there in the 1870 to 1912 time period. The farm is at the east end of Richmond Road in Putnam -- I visited the farm when visiting one of his great-grandsons in 1990.

On Ancestry, there was an 1880 Non-Population Agricultural Census record for James Richmond  that I had not seen before.  Here it is:

James is #9 on this page (in four separate tables) with information about his farm.  I input the image into Scribe AI and what I learned was:

Principal Individual

• Name: James Richmond
• Role in Document: Farm Owner (Row 9)
• Location: Putnam, Windham County, Connecticut
• Farm Details: You can see he owned 80 acres of land in total (40 tilled, 29 permanent meadows, 3 woodland, 8 other). His farm was valued at $1,900, farming implements at $150, and livestock at $260. The estimated value of all his farm productions in 1879 was $350.
• Livestock & Products: He owned 1 horse, 4 milch cows, and 3 swine. His cows dropped 3 calves and produced 200 lbs of butter. He also kept 16 barnyard poultry which produced 50 eggs.
• Crops: He cultivated 2 acres of Indian corn (yielding 60 bushels), 4 acres of oats (yielding 120 bushels), and 1/2 acre of Irish potatoes (yielding 50 bushels). He had an orchard with 35 bearing apple trees and cut 45 cords of wood valued at $9.

Associated Individuals

• Wesley Gibson: Enumerator for this district.
• Other Farmers Listed: Putnam Town Farm, George Leach, George A. Pettis, Rufus Malbone, John Gibbons, Jesse H. White, Lucia Perrin, Edward O'Brien, and Nicholas Cosgrove.

The two minutes I spent waiting for this listing saved me half an hour of trying to write it down or type it up.  

This helps me better understand the extent of James Richmond's farm.  It is more than the dairy farm that I was told it was when I visited. My guess is that his descendants turned it into a dairy farm in the years after James Richmond died.

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