Friday, August 10, 2012

Census Saturday - Siamese You Say...

Well, I say you're wrong....but being an indexer for the 1940 US Federal Census is a thankless job sometimes.  Still, when looking up Walter and Elizabeth Bagovich in the newly indexed 1940 census, I just about fell out of my seat laughing when I saw this:


Siamese, eh?  So I'm looking at this going, "Wow, this is either 1) some neat new information, 2) the wrong person, or 3) a transcription error."

So let's take what's behind door number 3 because when I looked at (and zoomed in on) the actual image I could see that under race, the census taker attempted to write in "Lithuanian" instead of the standard letter response (it should have been a "W" in this case).  I can understand why the indexer would have had a difficult time making out what was written.  It's certainly easier for me knowing a bit about their ancestry.




Sadly, there's nowhere for me to submit a correction for their race.  I can actually understand this one.  Can you imagine all those crazies trying to insist that the census taker got it wrong because their couldn't possibly be [insert race here] in their ancestry!  So since the surname was transcribed as "Bagowick" I could submit a correction with a name variation of "Bagovich" and place in the comments block that the race is also transcribed incorrectly and should be Lithuanian. Although the naughty census taker apparently didn't follow the instructions when filling in that bit!

Another error...Walter and Elizabeth weren't born in Pennsylvania.  At least that's family lore (and not yet verified), but previous census records tell me I'm correct (unless they were all wrong!).

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