Bracketed!

No, this is not a belated post about March Madness. I found another set of twins, Christine and Ernesteen Howard, age three. Sometimes the census taker noted twins on the census, but this one used brackets to denote the relationship:

Also, look at all those kids!

(Anson County, NC, ED 4-23, Sheet 18-A)

Widowed young

Here's a sad one - Mildred Stewart, age 25, a widow with two kids. Notice she's living with her mother, also a widow.

If you do the math, she was around 17 when her daughter was born and 18 when her son was born and then widowed before 25. What a hard life...

(Anson County, NC, ED 4-23, Sheet 18-A)

Imagination or the lack thereof

Some people just had no imagination:

(Alamance Co, NC, ED 1-24, Sheet 13-B)

Adoption, anyone?

I had been wondering if the census-takers would ever make a distinction about adopted children (that's assuming the parents would offer up the information). Alamance County, NC, (ED 1-5, Sheet 20-B)

Where's Waldo?

In Boone Station, Alamance County, NC:

ED 1-5,Sheet 19-A

Double trouble

The Miller family of Alamance County, North Carolina caught my eye during indexing, because they had not one, but two sets of twins: Alene and Irene, age 19, and Haywood and Elwood, age 10.

Was it a rule that if you had twins in the 30s and 40s you had to give them rhyming or matching names? As a twin myself, I'm thankful that trend skipped my family!

I'll have more on the Millers a little later, as the sheer number of children intrigued me...

Update on the number 3 and race

Thanks to the fine folks over at the Family Search indexing forums, I now know about the penciled-in codes in the race column, alluded to in my earlier post about Indians:

• Mex = 1 (along with White)
• Col or C = 2 (along with Neg)
• In = 3
• Chi = 4
• Jp or Jap = 5
• Fil = 6
• Hin = 7
• Kor = 8

(from PROCEDURAL HISTORY OF THE 1940 CENSUS OF POPULATION AND HOUSING, page 132 of PDF, http://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/v...umproc1940.pdf)

It was for the coders who took the census returns and punched them into tabulating machines. (These were originally built by Tabulating Machines Company, later know as International Business Machines, or IBM, although the Census Bureau started building their own around 1905-1907.) The numbers were to help them distinguish between the less common "races" so you only sometimes see a 2, and I've not yet seen a 1.