A coworker alerted me to a funny Facebook post by Deidre Denton of Twisted Twigs on Gnarled Branches of Genealogy.
You probably think you have some ancestors that just dropped onto the planet from outer space. Well, there’s another explanation:
They were roaming basket makers living in the woods.
The enumerator added this note about this band of nomads:
These People live in
the woods and you
can hardly Tell whether
they are Human or
Brutes
I worked for the US 1980 census. One elderly employee kept adding his own notes to forms, when he wasn't napping.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a bunch of mighty poor folks...
ReplyDeleteAn enumerator for the 1891 Canadian census in the area where my Detroit River French Canadian ancestors lived (outside of Detroit) wrote a little essay at the end about the "character of the populace." The farmland sucked and so did the fishing, and the young people were all moving to the city or getting jobs on lake ships. I don't know if he wrote that on his own, or if it was part of the job, but it would be nice if all the census takers had written something like that.
ReplyDelete