As genealogists eagerly await release of the U.S. Census of 1950 (due out in April, 2022), let’s take another of our occasional looks at a key census of the past. Today, we’ll examine the “vanished” census –that of 1890. Nearly all the population lists were lost in a fire in the basement of the Department of Commerce in 1921 or thrown away later as hopelessly waterlogged.
For a complete listing of what little is available, go to the National Archives website at www.archives.gov/research/census/1890.
All is not lost, though. If you are looking to that census for information about a Civil War veteran ancestor or that ancestor’s widow, you could be in luck. That’s because a separate listing of the veterans or their widows had been created as part of the 1890 census effort. Most of that survived and is available.
I’ve used the old microfilms, back when they had to be ordered through selected libraries, and they are quite informative.
Today, though, these military listings have been digitized by FamilySearch and are available free on their website www.familysearch.org. Technically, the list is called “Special Schedules of the Eleventh Census (1890) Enumerating Union Veterans and Widows of Union Veterans of the Civil War.”
Perhaps the closest thing to a bright spot when it comes to 1890 research is that over the years some states have conducted their own censuses. Try the official websites of the states you are interested in to see if anything like this is available from around 1890, whether of military veterans and widows or the general population.
Apart from its unavailability, the Census of 1890 was noteworthy for its vault into modern times through automation. Dissatisfied with the length of time it took to hand process the 1880 Census, federal authorities commissioned an electric machine that sorted cards punched to indicate data on the people polled.
So, statistical results became available in far less time than the seven years it had taken to analyze the previous census. This advance has been described as the first step on the road to today’s use of computers in the Census Bureau.
While the loss of the Census of 1890 has been costly to genealogists since, the government was still able to generate the statistics and reports it needed during the 1890s, such as the number of people who owned homes compared to the figure for 1880.
The problem for genealogists is that we have no 1890 record of those individuals with their ages, addresses, occupations and national origins, except for the small quantity of records spared by the fire and the Civil War listings.
So, what is the genealogist to do about this decade-long gap? One technique is to compare the 1880 and 1900 census records, which will give you an idea who was in a given family and what their ages were in 1890. There is also the route of city directories, generally available through larger public libraries and regional historical societies.
Another possibility is newspapers. The service newspapers.com might well include articles pertaining to 1890 ancestors. Remember, in those days newspaper references to individuals often included home addresses, unlike today’s more privacy-based reporting.
Newspaper obituaries in particular are treasure troves of information about origins, occupations and families, if you can pin the ancestor’s passing even to an approximate date.
Of course, if you live in the Wilkes-Barre area you will have access to the Luzerne County Historical Society and the Osterhout Free Library newspaper files, when those institutions have fully reopened.