Terry's TMG Tips

Census Source Type – Special Schedules

This page created 15 Apr 2014

Version Note: Applies to Versions 8 & 9

My Census Source Types article describes my general approach to citing US Census records. That article lists the five different Source Types I have developed, and provides a means to download them so they can be imported into your Project. This article describes in detail the Source Type I have developed for recording a variety of special schedules which were used in the 1850 to 1940 Population Schedules.

This Source Type is designed to record one entry in the special schedule used in the US census. These schedules include the Agriculture Schedule, Industrial Schedule, Veterans Schedule, and Mortality Schedule, which were used in various years from 1850 through 1940. These schedules used a format quite different than the Population Schedules, with each entry focused on a single, farm, business, or individual, and thus require somewhat different entries in the citations than those schedules. The following discussion describes how the Source Type is constructed, and provides notes about its construction and usage.

The Templates

The following templates are used in this Source Type:

Style Notes

There are some differences between the notes produced by this template and the example in Elisabeth Mills' Evidence!. The principal one is that I repeat the name of the subject person in the short footnote instead of the dwelling and family numbers. I believe this makes the notes easier to follow, especially if you have a lot of census cites in your report. I've eliminated the listing of the Supervisor's District, as I've never found it to be useful in finding a census listing.

I have included the Comments element, in which I record when and where I saw the census. This is based on comments by Ms Mills that some copies of the census may be more clear than others, so recording the date and location of the copy viewed is a good idea. Now that "enhanced" copies of the census images are available online and on CDs, this seems like an especially good idea.

Many census sheets have both a hand written "sheet" number and a rubber stamped page number and letter. There seems to be no consensus on which to use, but I have decided to use the original number hand-written in the space provided, and the letter since in most cases it seems the number remains the same for each letter.

Technical Notes

The following may be helpful to those interested in creating a Source Type using this method:

• There is no example in Evidence! for the special schedules so I created my own model adapting the example for the Population schedule.
• I have made custom Source Elements for County and State. The Mills example reverses the order of the county and state between the footnotes and the bibliography. You cannot do that with a single location element, but using two elements accomplishes that. For help creating a custom Source Element, and especially considerations for selecting the Source Element Group, see my article on Working with Source Elements and Groups. I put the County element in the Record Type Group, and State in the Second Location Group.
• I created custom Source Elements for Enumeration District, Group Level, and Schedule, which makes it easier to recall which data to enter in which field on the Source Definition screen. By placing them in the Series, Version, and Volumes Groups respectively they appear in a logical order on the Source Definition Screen.
• For help with the procedure of creating a custom Source Type see my article on Creating a Custom Source Type.
• I do not use detail information, such as the name of the subject person, in the Bibliography Template and the Mills examples for Census do not either. But if you prefer you could include those Source Elements in the Bibliography.
• This template is designed for one Source defined in the Master Source List for each institution in the census.

Usage Notes

When the Source is cited enter any notes specific to the individual citation, which will vary by type of schedule. The following might apply to a Mortality Schedule:

• Name Tag: shows name as Frank Reigel
• Birth Tag: shows age 65 and state
• Death Tag: shows month and cause of death
• Occupation Tag: shows occupation as farm hand

Downloading this Source Type

For those who prefer to down load this Source Type and Import it into their Project rather than create their own version, it and my other census Source Types are available from my Census Source Types article.

Copyright 2000- by Terry Reigel