ROOTS & BRANCHES

When you come across an anomaly in genealogy—and, let me tell you, if you don’t come across anomalies, you’re not trying hard enough—it helps to check your assumptions about such seeming contradictions.

In a recent social media conversation, a person asked about one of these situations—in this case a date for an ancestor’s birth that seemed clearly wrong—and presented potential answers as a binary choice: “Didn’t he know or was he lying?”

Well, “Holy false binary, Batman!”

I commented in the thread that there were all sorts of reasons for getting an anomalous answer … including simply not understanding the question.

One way such anomalies show up are birthplaces shown in the U.S. Census, especially regarding the oft-changing entity we call “Germany.”

Here are abstracts from the instructions (which enumerators may or may not have followed) for all the publicly available censuses in which every person was to be named:

• 1850 – Enumerators were to use “name of the government or country if without the United States.” In many cases, birthplace was attributed to the generic “Germany” even though that was not yet technically the name of “the government or country.”
• 1860, 1870  and 1880 – The instructions were made more explicit that a particular German state should be used: “To insert simply Germany would not be deemed a sufficiently specific localization of birth place, unless no better can be had. The particular German State should be given—as Baden, Bavaria, Hanover,” according to a quote from the 1860 instructions.
• 1900 and 1910 – Here the rules changed in the direction of less specificity. To quote the 1900 instructions: “By country is meant usually a region whose people have direct relation with other countries. Thus, do not write Prussia or Saxony, but Germany.”
• 1920 – For Germany (as well as other empires that had lost territory in World War I—Austria, Russia and Turkey), “enter the name of the Province (State or Region) in which born” (with examples given such as Alsace-Lorraine, Bavaria and German Poland)) or “or the name of the city or town in which born, as Berlin, Prague, Vienna, etc.” The amount of specificity actually found in the records varies.
• 1930 – Germany is again noted for special attention, this time listed among the six countries who lost land after World War I. Enumerators were to ask whether the birthplace was still in the original country and if not to record the name of the current country if possible.
• 1940 – The general instruction was for “the name of the country only” but there was a special rule for central European areas “where there have been recent changes in boundaries” and the birthplace was to be noted as of the boundaries at the beginning of 1937.