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Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Using the 1940 Census: an OA Example


 Announcement: Easton Curiosity Shop blogs on history and genealogy will now be available on the Easton Patch website as well as here. All other blogs will continue to appear here exclusively.



The 1940 census is now available online at Ancestry.com free for non-members. This census is the most detailed enumeration available to researchers and includes information not found in earlier censuses. Recently I had the opportunity to use this census to track down some important information.

I do research for the Oliver Ames Athletic Hall of Fame. Besides showing athletic prowess, a student candidate must graduate from OA. Generally, this is easy to determine since the list of graduates is published in he annual town report. What if student’s name doesn’t appear in the town report? That’s where I get called in because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Recently, I got the call for a candidate who should have graduated in 1928 or 1929, meaning that there wouldn’t be any classmates who could confirm a graduation.

My first check usually is the yearbook collections at Oliver Ames and the Easton Historical Society. Before 1949 the last issue of the school magazine served as the yearbook. Unfortunately, neither place has a complete run of early graduation issues. All I was able to determine was that the candidate had been a stellar athlete as an undergraduate.

My second stop is normally the life card stored at the high school. This is available only to staff members with special permission from the principal. Members of the general public may call in and request information from their own card or basic information like graduation from other people’s card with their permission. In the current case, the candidate’s older and youngest siblings were in the collection, but the three middle children were not. This was surprising, but not unusual for someone who would have graduated in late 1920s. The card could have been misfiled among the thousands of cards or perhaps sent on to another school.

There were rumors that the candidate’s family had moved to Brockton for a short time so I decided to turn to the census. The 1940 census was very helpful. The candidate, age 28, was single and still living in the parents home. A column indicated they had been there in 1935 and a quick look at the 1930 showed the family in the same house then a year or two after the candidate should have graduated. The key column, however, was a new one in 1940 that listed the level of education attained. The next door neighbor’s father had an E-4 while his wife had an H-4. This meant he had left school after the fourth grade while she had graduated from high school. Our candidate and a sibling both had H-3 next to their names meaning that they had left school after their junior year.

Normally, a researcher would be forced to conclude the candidate hadn’t graduated from high school, but from my own family research, I know that census records are not always accurate. Luckily, the Easton Historical Society has a set of records not usually available to historians because they are normally thrown away. These are the attendance registers of Easton’s schools covering the years from the late 1860s to the early 1970s. Turning the pages of these heavy volumes revealed that the candidate had a younger sibling in the same grade. Both finished their junior year with the candidate only missing three days all year-all in June, 1928. When school resumed in September the candidate did not return for senior year. Did she move to another school? The attendance record is silent because she never re-entered; only the missing life card would tell. However, the sibling did return to start senior year. That record ended October 16, 1928 with the notation “left.”

While it is still possible that the candidate attended another school, the evidence of the census makes that appear unlikely.  So despite an excellent athletic record at OA and an even better record as an adult, this candidate will not make the Hall of Fame unless some additional

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