Sunday 9 June 2013

Census Sunday – vanishing ancestors

This point is so simple, I’m wondering if I should even mention it.

About a year ago, I was looking for information about the family of James and Lucy Augood who were Londoners, in English Censuses from 1861 to 1911. James and Lucy’s daughter, Harriett, is my great grandmother.

To my bewilderment, I could find not a single reference to any Augood when searching the Censuses online (on ancestry.com). Could they somehow have dodged every census for 50 years? No they hadn’t.

The key was to look for alternative spellings (Angood, Argood, Aregood, etc). Doing that, I found them in every Census in that period. I must acknowledge the help of Sylvia Murphy, a lovely lady and volunteer at the Society of Australian Genealogists library (and an authority, among things, on researching British and other ancestors in India).

I assume the problem is that words in handwriting on a document like a census page can be keyed or captured incorrectly. Here’s an image of one of the census pages with the name “Augood” on it. Or is that “Angood”?


Ancestry gives the option to Add Alternate Information, allowing you, as they say, to “not only set the record straight, you help other researchers find this person.

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