I've been using the 1865 Illinois State Census at FamilySearch. Between the poor handwriting, the faded ink, and the non-English names, it has been easier to search page by page to find the people I am looking for.
If you have people you cannot find in a specific record and you have a reasonably good idea of where they were living, go back and manually search the records if at all possible. I've found quite a few of my 1865 people in the Illinois State Census--most of them by searching one page at a time. Sometimes that's what has to happen.
And the guy in Chicago I may never find.
We've mentioned this before, but the need to sometimes manually search is one that most of us need to remember from time to time, myself included.
Just last week, I found my G-Grandfather Frederick Ertel in Liberty TWP, Adams Co. in that 1865 state census. They must have had disappearing ink for that census!
ReplyDeleteI had to do this for my husband's family. Their first and last names were reversed on the record with misspellings of both. I never would have found them without searching page by page of the county. This is very helpful in a rural area, too, as I have found many family members this way.
ReplyDeleteMichele M