Census! Census! Census!

Back in May I watched a genealogy lecture where the speaker encouraged the audience, including me, to research our ancestor’s neighborhood.  I’ve heard this many times and have written posts about the FAN club principle for this very blog.  In my genealogical research I’ve tried to learn more about John Washington Womble’s life in Tennessee and understand more as to why he left Hardeman County, moved to Nashville, and then returned to Hardeman about a year later.

I had studied before the 1870 and 1880 Hardeman County, TN census records for his household, in addition to the households of some of his children, and nephew in an effort to answer my questions.  However, I wasn’t able to learn much else that was new information.

After watching that genealogy lecture, I remembered a genealogy class assignment where I had to analyze the data of 100 people each in two different census years in an area where one of my ancestors lived.  I had really enjoyed the assignment, and decided to do something similar.  However, since John Washington Womble lived in different civil districts in 1870 and 1880, that evidence told me that he likely moved to a completely different area in the county than the one that he lived in when he left in 1873.  I felt that it would be a good idea to extract the census data from the civil district that he moved to in 1870 and 1880 in order to learn more about the neighborhood into which he moved to.

I then downloaded each of the census pages for the 11^th civil district for the census years 1870 and 1880 and created spreadsheets for each year.  Then, I began going through the pages and extracting the names, ages, race, and occupation, etc. for each resident of that district.  It was a pretty long process and not very exciting, but I felt that I discovered some clues as to why John Washington Womble moved back there when he left Nashville and perhaps even why he moved there in the first place after the Civil War.

As I extracted the data, I did come across some problems with my plan.  A few pages of the 1880 census that I was extracting data from had parts of the pages damaged.  So, I didn’t have complete information on all of the residents in that district.  I tried viewing the records using different census record providers to see if perhaps I could find undamaged records.  However I wasn’t fortunate, and decided to just leave out that information since it wasn’t available and continued extracting. 

I’m still in the process of crunching the census data for both years, but will post again if I make any new discoveries.