Ceparation in the Census

When you’ve found your family on the census, do you look at the last page in their Enumeration District (ED)?  Maybe you should.
 
When the census enumerator completed his rounds and had a list of every name in the district, often he had to make a copy.  But what if he missed a name when rewriting the list?  He might have listed all those missing names at the end of the ED. 
 
You can get to these final pages of an ED on Ancestry by looking at image numbers.   Here’s an image from an ED in San Bruno, San Mateo, California in 1940.  

​You can navigate to any image within this ED simply by typing the image number in the box at the bottom.  You can see I’m on Image 54 or 55, so right near the end.  Look carefully at this page, and you will see that the third and fourth columns, “House No.” and “Visited No.” are quite out of order.  Almost everyone on this page “belonged” in a household which was enumerated on a previous page.  Perhaps the enumerator forgot to write them down on his original list and had to “catch up” at the end.
 
If you are using FamilySearch for your census images, you also have an option to select a particular image in the set.

Some enumerators even used the last page of their counts to write some notes about what they encountered while performing their census duties.
 
Make sure to check the last pages for all the enumeration districts you look at.  You just never know what you might see there!


For more census tips, check out my "Censational Census Strategies" webinar on Legacy Family Tree webinars, or look for the category "Census" here on my blog.