Genealogy – Page 5

The Age of Mary Parker

After a couple of years of little progress mostly due to focusing on other parts of my family tree, I’ve been making huge progress with the Parkers. You’ve probably noticed the multiple posts about them recently.

A few weeks ago, I noticed there was a Find-A-Grave memorial for a Leonard Parker at the church cemetery in Saint Mary, Ontario. Leonard Parker is reputed to be the brother of my ancestor, Patrick Parker. I wrote to the person who put up the memorial, asking if they were related. The answer was yes, and we exchanged some information about our respective family trees. One of the things she clued me in to was that the parish registers for some of the Roman Catholic churches have been scanned and are on FamilySearch. Not indexed, but available.

Which brings me to my great great grandmother, Mary Parker Ryan. She married William Dennis Ryan in 1864, had six children, and died of typhus in 1875, not quite eleven years into her marriage. She had a short and somewhat forgotten life. Every time I mentioned her to one of my relatives, I get blank looks. Apparently my great grandparents and grandparents generations talked so rarely about her that no one in the next generation had heard of her. That sort of reaction is part of why I’ve been drawn to genealogy, to remember the people who haven’t been.

The main source of information I had on Mary was her grave monument in a small cemetery on a hill about a mile east of Patch Grove, Wisconsin. I visited Saint Johns Cemetery in June 2011.

Grave marker for Mary Ryan (1841-1875) — Grave marker for Mary Ryan

It’s quite a nice monument for the time. William Ryan cared enough to spend some dough on it. Here’s a close up of the inscription.

inscription on Mary Ryan's monument — inscription on Mary Ryan’s monument

It reads:

Mary
Wife of Wm. D. Ryan.
Born Jan. 7, 1841. In
Ramsey, Township of Perth.
Canada West. Died
Feb. 20, 1875,
Aged 34 yrs. 1 mo. 13 ds.

The inscription has a number of problems with it. The Parkers lived for a time in Blanshard township in Perth County, Canada West. There is no Ramsey township in Perth County, and as far as I can tell, there never has been. The only Ramsey township I’ve been able to find is in Lanark County, Ontario. That sort of fits with another family legend, that Mary’s mother was one Mary Murphy who was part of the Peter Robinson settlement of Canada. One of those settlements was in Ramsey township. I have doubts as to whether Mary Murphy really was part of that endeavor, but there’s a geographical connection at least. Oh, and the nearest city to Ramsey township is Perth. My working hypothesis was that this particular Ramsey was the one indicated on her grave.

Additionally, her death certificate and other accounts put her date of death as 23 Feb 1875. Three days difference isn’t that big of a deal. Still…

A further problem is that there is a second marker for Mary in front of the monument:

You’ll notice this one gives a year of birth as 1840, rather than 1841. Rather confusing.

And, as it turns out, both are likely wrong. Going back to the thing above about the Ontario parish registers being online… I looked at the register for Perth’s Saint John the Baptist parish. There was no entry for Mary Parker in 1841. Her brothers Stephen and Patrick were there in 1835 and 1837, but no Mary. On the first perusal, I missed it. But on the second look through, I saw an entry for a Mary Parker in 1839:

On the 28th day of February 1839 the undersigned Priest of this Parish
has Baptized Mary seven weeks old of the lawful marriage of Patrick
Parker & Mary Murphy of Ramsey.
Sponsors Nicholas Dison and Emilia Dison

That’s an entry in a contemporaneous journal of parish actions. Unless it’s for a different Mary Parker, it’s pretty convincing evidence she was actually born in January 1839. January 7th fits, so I’m guessing that’s her actual birthday.

However, by the time the monument was erected, people were guessing at her actual age. Maybe she’d shaved off a couple of years. Maybe she forgot or didn’t know. Maybe the monument was erected years after her death. I’ve no idea the reason.

As an added bonus for this post, among the effects found in my great aunt’s house last year when she died was this photograph:

On the back is the inscription “Mary Park” and the paper is torn. Is it my ancestor or another Mary Parker or did whoever wrote the inscription just guess? I’ve no idea.

Anton Weiss in Cassville

There was another item in the map I found yesterday that is of interest to me. On one of the other sheets is a city map of Cassville, where my great great grandfather Anton Weiss operated a hardware store for close to 50 years.

Just as I was able to find Patrick Parker in Glen Haven, Anton Weiss store shows up in this map too:

Map of Cassville in 1868 showing Anton Weiss

Here’s what the location looks like today:

Denniston and Amelia, Cassville in 2013 (Google Street View)

I’ve made one visit to Cassville, but at the time I didn’t know the location of the family home.

Patrick Parker in Grant County

My genealogy white whale since shortly after I started has been finding Patrick Parker and his wife Mary Murphy. I’ve written about them here multiple times. I’d found pretty solid evidence on what happened to 8 of their 10 children, the only two where I was missing basic information were the sons James and John. Last month I found good evidence for James. Two weeks ago I found John, though I haven’t pursued it much yet.

But as much information as I’ve found on all their children, the evidence I have for the pair themselves is aggravatingly small. I’ve located them together in the 1851 Canada Census, the 1860 US Census, and the 1870 US Census. I have a possible grave site for Patrick in Iowa. And Mary Murphy can be found in the 1885 Iowa Census. That’s the sum total of direct evidence I have for them.

I have indirect evidence for them. I know they arrived in Canada between 1832 and 1835, based on the listed countries of birth for their children. The death records for several children list their names. The grave marker for my great great grandmother Mary Parker Ryan gives a place of birth for her, which places Mary Murphy in that place at least.

Today I was looking through the online maps collection for the Wisconsin Historical Society, and I saw they had added a map for Grant County from 1868, and the description included “shows townships and sections, landownership, …” The earliest landownership map for Grant County that I’ve viewed came from 1878 and the Parkers were not to be found on it. So, I took a peek at the 1868 map:

1868 map of Grant County, Wisconsin showing the Parker and Ryan farms highlighed

Lo and behold, there he is! The P. Parker farm is just southwest of North Andover (a town which is no longer a town). On the map, I also highlighted the location of the farm for Patrick Parker’s son in law, William Dennis Ryan. And with handy Google Maps, I can show you where the Parker farm is on today’s maps.

This is the first direct piece of evidence for their existence that I’ve found in nearly 2 years. You don’t know how thrilled I am about this.

James Parker in Wisconsin and California

A page from a compiled genealogy of the Parkers

I’ve previously written about Patrick Parker and his wife Mary Murphy. One of the family legends passed on to me by other researchers was that they had a son names James who went off to California, never to be heard from again.

There is a James Parker who appears in the 1852 Census of Canada in the vicinity of Patrick Parker’s family. He’s born about 1832 in Ireland. However, that census does not list relationships so there’s no telling if he’s a son or some other relation to Patrick. In the 1860 US Census, there’s a James Parker living with Patrick Parker’s family in Glen Haven, Wisconsin. The age listed would put his year of birth about 1832, also in Ireland. Listed below him are Ellen, John and Napolean Parker. The 1860 US Census also does not list relationships, so it’s not certain how they relate to Patrick either. But the placement is typical of an adult son who has married but is still living in the same household as his parents. It’s not certain by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the most likely possibility.

James, Ellen, John and Napolean Parker in Glen Haven, 1860 — James, Ellen, John and Napolean Parker in Glen Haven

I’ve researched all the other children of Patrick Parker and Mary Murphy who showed up in the United States, and have had some luck with tracking many of their descendants who lived mostly in Iowa. But this James disappeared after 1860.

And last night I found something intriguing. There appears to be a very similar entry for another James Parker in San Joaquin Township, Sacramento County in California, also in 1860.

James Parker in San Joaguin — James, E., John, and N.J. Parker in San Joaquin

Listed with this James Parker are an E., a John, and an N.J. Parker. They have similar ages, though slightly different. They are listed as from Canada and Wisconsin rather than Ireland and Wisconsin. But remarkably similar overall. At this point, I don’t have anything to corroborate this record.

It was at this point that I started writing this post, thinking that I had a something interesting to follow up on for later.

However, as I am wont to do, I added this to my Ancestry.com tree for James Parker. I treat my Ancestry.com tree as a database of possibilities. I’ve even posted a note on it warning other people they should copy my tree at their peril. When I posted this census entry to the family of James Parker, Ancestry went to work and started matching new records. Now that they live in California, it starts ranking California based records higher in its sort. Nothing popped up for James Parker, but four new census entries showed up for John Parker, born in 1858 in Wisconsin and living in California.

The first of these is a John Parker living in Santa Barbara in 1900 with wife Margaret and children John Warren, Mary Ellen, James Galen, and Ruth M. Now, this is also no guarantee that this is the same John Parker. In fact, the link was tenuous enough that I did not add the record to my entry for John Parker even with the database of possibilities caveat. It would just be too hard to unwind if it turned out to be wrong. So I created a new, disconnected family for a new John Parker and recorded it. If the research was a dead end, I could just delete them all, I wouldn’t have to disconnect them from the known Parker tree, and everything would be good.

I also added the 1910 US Census entry for the family (image not included with this post). This one had the same children, except that Mary Ellen is listed as Inez in 1910. Other people on Ancestry had added these two census records to families headed by a John Parker and Margaret Miscall.

The next step in this bread crumb trail of discovery is an entry in Ancestry.com’s California Death Index. The California Death Index is just a list of death certificates that were filed with the state between 1940 and 1997. It’s not a dispositive record without seeing copies of the underlying certificates, but I’ve generally had good luck with the index being correct. I haven’t seen the errors for the database that I’ve seen with other transcriptions.

The entry that I found was this:

Name:	Mary Elleninez Gerard
[Mary Elleninez Parker] 	
Social Security #:	563325739
Gender:	Female
Birth Date:	1 Nov 1890
Birth Place:	California
Death Date:	5 Jun 1981
Death Place:	Orange
Mother's Maiden Name:	Miscall
Father's Surname:	Parker

Mary Elleninez Gerard (neé Parker)? That looks really promising, I thought to myself. Date of birth matches up, and the parents’ surnames match up with what other people had found for John and Margaret. None of those researchers had linked the record to Mary Ellen Parker however. Nevertheless, I added a husband to her with a last name of Gerard so that Ancestry’s search engine would look for her as part of a Gerard family. Nothing popped up immediately.

And nothing else popped up for any of the other family members at the time either. I haven’t been doing real research in this process. This is just following my nose and poking around. It’s late at night and I should go to bed. However…

Last year my great grand aunt Frances died at the age of 103. In June of this year, I picked up five boxes of photos and other personal effects that had been in her possession from a cousin. I’ve been paying my friend Kim to scan all these items so they’d be available for everyone in the family. One of the items is an album containing photos from what appears to be trips my great grandparents Joe and Frances Weiss took. They visited relatives in Colorado, Illinois and California. And toward the back of the album was a photo of a nun with an inscription that appeared to be Sr. M. Germaine Parker. It’s hard to read.

I’ve thought Sister Parker might be a connection to one of the two missing branches of the Parker family. In addition to James Parker, there’s also another John Parker who went missing in records after 1880. He probably exists somewhere, but John Parker is such an incredibly common name and records from the 1800s are often sketchy. I haven’t found anything that matches up with him.

So I pulled out the album and looked for the photo. Sister Parker looks to be in her 30s or 40s, though it’s quite hard to tell with her habit covering everything except her face. I flipped backward through the pages of the album looking for other photos of her. And then I saw this photo:

Jeanne Margaret and Mary Ellen Gerard – ’21

Gerard! Mary Ellen Inez Parker Gerard! Could these be her children? Must search harder for her! And bingo! In 1920, there’s this census record:

Henry Gerard – 1920 in Los Angeles

Henry and Inez Gerard, living on Gardner Street in Los Angeles with children Jeanne and Mary Ellen, aged 4 and 1¼ years old. Those are the two girls from the photo. And Inez matches up with the daughter of John Parker.

And the most likely reason my great grandparents would be visiting the Gerard family that matches up with this trail is because they are related.

This is just the beginning. I’ll have a lot of hard work to prove all of this. That record for James Parker may be incorrect. James may be a cousin of my great great grandmother Mary Parker and not her oldest brother. James himself may disappear from available records. But my great grandparents did not visit the Gerard family randomly.

This is why family genealogists should research the descendants of their ancestors. The descendants provided the link that may lead to valuable information about James Parker and ultimately my third great grandparents, Patrick and Mary Parker. had I not gone down the tree, James Parker may have remained among the disappeared.

Anton Weiss arrival in America

I think I’ve found the correct passenger manifest which shows my great great grandfather Anton Weiss arriving in America.

Anton applied for a passport in 1886 stating that he emigrated from Bremen on 4 Mar 1852, however he forgot the ship’s name.

On 9 Apr 1852 the Agnes arrived in New York from Bremen with an Anton Weiss aboard. He’s 24 years old, from Prussia, and his occupation is mechanic. That’s doesn’t exactly match what I know about Anton Weiss, but it’s reasonably close. Anton was actually 25, from Bavaria, and worked as a tinsmith in the first references to his occupation in the U.S. Anton turned 25 on 27 Feb 1852. He could easily have been 24 when he first registered with the Bremen emigration bureau.

Anton Weiss on the Agnes passenger manifest

What clued me in to the manifest is an entry in the United States Germans to America Index, 1850-1897 for Anton Weiss. That lists a 24 year old Bavarian named Anton Weiss, occupation coppersmith, arriving in New York on the Agnes on 9 Apr 1852. I don’t know why this database lists him as Bavarian rather than Prussian or gives his occupation as coppersmith instead of mechanic. This entry matches what I know about Anton Weiss pretty closely.

Coppersmith, tinsmith, and mechanic would have been very similar occupations in the 1850s. That discrepancy doesn’t bother me.

The discrepancy that bothers me is the scanned microfilm image gives his origin as Prussian. Bavaria and Prussia were were not interchangeable countries in 1852. Indeed, several other passengers have their origin listed as Hesse, Hanover, and Germany. So where the Germans to America Index gets Bavaria, I don’t know. Stuff to research!

Weisses in New Mexico

I have a great great uncle, Frank Weiss, who moved from the family home in Cassville Wisconsin to Pukwana South Dakota. He married Nannie Conaway in 1890, and they had 4 children. Robert died young, and the other three were Marion, Theodore, and Agnes.

I think I just solved some puzzles that in retrospect shouldn’t have been all that difficult to figure out.

The first is that I found a census entry for Nannie Weiss living with Agnes Weiss in Carlsbad, New Mexico in 1920. Nannie and Agnes were also listed in Pukwana in 1920. I found the New Mexico entry several years ago and wondered what that was about. Vacation?

The next part of the mystery is the 1915 South Dakota state census. The only member of the family I could find was Frank Weiss.

1915 South Dakota state census card for Frank Weiss

I figured Marion being missing was because she was attending the University of Illinois, as she graduated in 1917. And maybe Theodore was off working somewhere. And not finding someone in the records in a place I know they should be is very common. Records are spotty. I got a letter just yesterday from the Social Security Administration saying they had no record of my grandfather’s death, so they could not release information about him to me. Missing records are a common problem. I didn’t think too much of the missing members of the Weiss family.

The last puzzle was Agnes’ obituary. It mentioned that Agnes finished 8th grade in Wisconsin and then moved with the family to New Mexico for a few years. For some reason, I never connected that with the other pieces of information. The obituaries for Nannie and the other children never mentioned anything about New Mexico. In fact, Theodore’s said he lived in Pukwana his entire life save for the time he spent in the military.

It appears now that Nannie moved with the kids who were still at home. In 1915, the county assessor who conducted the census didn’t include them because he knew they didn’t live there. But the US Census in 1920 asks who normally lived in the domicile. And to Frank, Nannie and his children normally lived there, so he included them in his responses. At the same time, Nannie also answered the queries as if she normally lived on her own with Agnes in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

The questions the records don’t answer is why Nannie took the kids and moved out for a time? There’s all sorts of possibilities, from domestic trouble to plans for the whole family to move to New Mexico that fell through. Perhaps the family fell on harder times and Nannie took several teaching positions. And why New Mexico?

The last grandchild of Frank and Nannie died last September. A number of great grandchildren are still alive, but none of them were older than 4 years when Nannie died in 1959. Unless Frank or Nannie wrote it down somewhere, I won’t get a chance to hear the story from someone who heard it directly from one of the participants.

That’s why when I meet distant relatives, I don’t ask them about names and dates. I ask them to tell me stories.

Geni.com becomes evil

Just under three years ago I started researching genealogy as a hobby. My girlfriend suggested Geni.com, and I signed up without knowing much about it. I kind of liked it at first, and even paid for a year’s worth of Geni Pro rather than their free service.

What Geni is trying to do is create one family tree for the entire world. I like that goal.

I don’t like how they’ve gone about it.

The way it worked when I joined was you entered people and information about them, and you became the manager of a profile for them. If you wished, you could merge that profile with a profile for the same person entered by another user. Then the two of you could collaborate on research about that person, jointly managing the profile. Any relative within 4 generations could be designated private, so that other users couldn’t see the information and it isn’t crawled by Google. This allows people to add close, living relatives to their family tree but keep their life details private.

Then a couple years ago, Geni changed policy. If the profile was for a person more than 4 generations back in time (i.e., your great grandparents or earlier in the tree), any Geni Pro user could edit them. This is a huge issue because there are a lot of really sloppy genealogists. I’ve no problem with sloppy research, but when it affects my research, I get cranky. I stopped using Geni for the most part, though I kept my account and periodically edited a profile or two.

Another aspect of Geni is that they have a class of users called curators. Curators are uber-users. They can manage popular profiles (e.g., Queen Elizabeth, Charlemagne) preventing sloppy genealogy work being done on them. They can approve merges made between abandoned profiles. Those are good things, mostly.

But recently, though I’m not sure when, Geni decided that curators should have unfettered access to private profiles. In other words, random genealogists have access to the private information about living people. Presumably the curators are now the unpaid customer service representatives. This is a huge problem!.

Also, those curators can approve merges and edits for private profiles. I had a first cousin entered, and so did someone else. A curator came along and saw that the information matched and merged the two profiles without the permission of either myself or the other person who had entered my cousin. So now that person can see a whole lot of private information I’ve entered where the 4 generations for both of us intersect. What does it matter, you’d think? They’re probably family. Except there was a divorce and I didn’t know the details. Now I can see some of that. And the other person can see similar pieces of information.

Allowing some random curator to decide on their own to make changes to private profiles, including merges, was the final straw. I sent an angry email to Geni and got back a really condescending response that I should ask the sloppy curator for help in fixing the mess that person caused. I replied back that I would do no such thing, that I wanted it back the way it was prior without me having to ask someone nicely. And then I got back another even more condescending response that I didn’t want to work on a collaborative site.

I never replied again. Had I, I would have pointed out that collaboration does not mean what that C.S.R. thought it meant. It does not mean making changes without telling other people affected. Working together means talking and discussing changes, none of which Geni’s designated curator did. Not to mention they shouldn’t have even been able to see private information in the first place.

I spent the next evening removing as much information as I could from Geni. I know they have logs of all the past information, so it’s futile if they decide to become even more evil than they already are. Rest assured Geni when you read this, if you restore that private information and/or make it available to anyone and I find out about it, I will sue. I don’t put it past them. The company has continually decided to make yet more information available to yet more people when people who entered that information did not expect it.

I will never put new information on Geni again. If you care about your family’s privacy, you won’t either.

Update: I saw that a lot of people visited this post from a curator forum discussion on Geni.com. That prompted me to go take a look at Geni’s privacy policy. And again I see they’ve updated it yet again to make previously private information public. Previously, up to four generations from yourself could be kept private. Now they keep private only information about living people. That would be fine if that’s how they started, but as I noted above, they keep changing it to reveal information that was previously private. Like I said: evil.

Johan Erik Eriksson

I’ve been re-researching my primary ancestry for a few months. I hadn’t realized that Ancestry.com had the Swedish church books until this fall. The husförhör, or household examination, books are amazing treasure troves of information. Every year the clergy would record the residents of every household in their parish, their birthdates, their marriages, their deaths, and their catechism. It’s better than a census, because people were recorded every year.

I’ve known my Swedish family tree since I started. My starting documents were pages of pedigree charts documenting the family back to the 1400s and even the 1300s in some cases. But these aren’t primary documents, obviously, but they do provide a good outline that makes it easy to find people in the church books, which are primary documents. I’ve also had the use of an index to the church documents that was made by the Piteå genealogical society. It only covers the Piteå river valley, but it’s not like my forebears were moving a lot like their American descendants.

Today I was looking at my third great grandfather, Peter Anton Nordvall. He was born 5 Aug 1841 in Håkansön to Jonas Persson Nordvall and Christina Isaksdotter. I easily found him in the birth register, the death register, and the marriage register. And I’d previously found his brother Per Magnus Nordvall, born 7 years before him. Per only lived about 8 months.

But the husförhör showed something I didn’t know. Peter had an older half-brother named Johan Erik. He never showed up in my searches of the index because he didn’t have the Nordvall last name. I’d searched for children of Jonas Nordvall and Christina Isaksdotter using various spellings of their names. But since his father wasn’t Jonas, I never found him under any combination.

The husförhör has a Johan Erik in the household, and it gives his date of birth. From that, it was easy to find his birth record. He was born in 1830 to Christina Isacsdotter, three years before Christina married Jonas. He went by the name Johan Erik Eriksson in later records, which probably means his father was named Erik. The birth record doesn’t name the father though, which means I am going to have a much harder time figuring out who he is.

And now I have a whole new branch to research.

Genealogy Research Plans

As I’ve been progressing with my genealogy work, I’ve been trying to improve my skills.

The Board for Certification of Genealogists pushes the Genealogical Proof Standard. As a hobbyist, I’m not beholden to this standard, thank god. I don’t particularly care if the distant parts of my tree are rigorously proved or not. At least not at this time. However, I would like to have pretty solid evidence, particularly for the activities of my direct ancestors.

One of the things a genealogist is supposed to do is write a research plan for investigating each claim. I’m experimenting with writing them for the less easy to document claims. I don’t think I’ll bother when researching items like my dad’s death. I have his obituary and his death certificate. But for something like my grandfather’s birth, I decided to write one. He was born on 5 February 1904 in Merrill, Wisconsin. But all the evidence I have for that is secondary and non-contemporaneous. What I do have is all consistent, so I would be highly surprised if original, primary, direct evidence contradicts the indirect and secondary evidence. I am unlikely to find original sources at this point, but there may be suitable derivative.

You can read my plan for investigating George Archibald Weiss’s birth.

The basic idea is to list the relevant known information, decide on a hypothesis, list possible sources of additional information, and create a strategy for investigating those sources. I don’t think there are birth certificates for 1904 from Lincoln County, but there are for sure better pieces of evidence than I’ve already collected. For instance, the counties returned lists of births to the state. That list is what’s indexed in the Wisconsin Genealogy Index mentioned in the plan. Print-outs of the microfilm from that return can be purchased. And I can look to see if the local papers mentioned a new Weiss kid in February or March of 1904. Read the plan to see.

I don’t know how well the plans I have written fit with what professionals do. The stuff I have seen on blogs here and there is pretty rudimentary. The one professional plan I’ve seen is an example by Elizabeth Shown Mills, who is the pedantic genealogist’s goddess. It’s involved, but was created for publication as well. She may not be quite as detailed and verbose for simpler research. Anyway, if I have really tricky items, or I want to publish, then perhaps I will make these more involved.

For now, the few claims I’ve tried for this (I’ve got a total of 6) have resulted in me at least thinking of additional places to research, and in building a better task list than I previously had.

Oh yeah, I’m experimenting with a new way of managing tasks too. I couldn’t find any decent tools for managing my genealogy tasks, so I’m doing a bit to roll my own. If anyone has an old copy of Microsoft Project or similar project management tool they’d be willing to sell me, I may use that for this tool. I tried OpenProj and ProjectLibre, which are clones of MS Project, and they are not up to the task. A future post will detail what I’m doing with regard to this.

The whereabouts of Nels Sorenson

I think I now have a complete set of census records for my great great grandfather, Nels Hansen Sorenson. He’s part of my grandmother’s branch of the family; she was estranged from the family so everything I know I have to reconstruct from records.

Her grandfather Niels was born in Langelands Denmark to an unmarried couple, Johan Sørensen and Marthe Kirstine Nielsen. A couple years later Marthe had another child out of wedlock, though she eventually married that man.

Perhaps because he was illegitimate or perhaps because his parents were poor, but Nels was not raised by his parents. He is with his mother in the 1855 Denmark Census in Bøstrup when he is about 6 months old. But in 1860 he’s living with his grandmother in Skrøbelev, and 1870 he’s a servant/farmboy for another person in the same parish who at this point I do not know if is related.

Skrøbelev Kirke (CC Arne Alexander Fræer Eckmann)

In 1880, Nels is still in Langelands in Illebølle but he’s married to my great great grandmother. In 1883 they would emigrate to Madison Wisconsin, where he Americanized his name to Nels Sorenson. In the 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930 United States Censuses, he’s living at 1118 E Gorham Street in Madison. I’ve also got the 1905 Wisconsin State Census for him as well. He died in 1931.

1118 E Gorham Madison Wisconsin — 1118 E Gorham St, Madison (Google Street View)

Assembling the Danish Census images was tough because it’s poorly indexed. I looked through them digital image by digital image. Luckily, the places he lived on Langelands are not particularly populated places. I think I only had to look through about 500 pages. Despite the use of patronymics, the name Niels Hansen Sorensen is pretty uncommon on Langelands. I’m not 100% certain the 1870 census I found is him though. The age, location, and birth place match with what he reported on other censuses, but I still don’t have a conclusive way to tie them together.

I am also missing the 1885 and 1895 Wisconsin Censuses for him. Those are theoretically well indexed, but he’s not in the indexes and Madison/Dane County are big places to search image by image. As those censuses include only the name of the head of household, I can’t search for other family members hoping that Nels himself was mis-transcribed.