Posted in 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy on July 4, 2017| 6 Comments »
Welcome to Eight Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy Research.
Good luck with your Rhode Island research!
Posts are the property of One Rhode Island Family.
Posted in 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy, Genealogy on September 30, 2016| 11 Comments »
This is the page for all things that did not fit well in the other categories, but have been very helpful to me.
Archives & manuscripts
Portsmouth Free Public Library, Portsmouth, Rhode Island
Booksellers
Boston Transcript
Church Records
First Baptist Church in America, Providence
City Directories
Court records
Geography
Immigration
Historical stuff
Journals
Laws and government
People of color in Rhode Island
Photography
Records of the poor
In closing
I will be updating this material from time to time. Thanks for your patience as I put these posts together. I wish you a lot of success with your Rhode Island research!
Slater Mill, first cotton mill in the United States, Pawtucket, R.I. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-116492
Find the rest of the 8 WEEKS TO BETTER RHODE ISLAND GENEALOGY RESEARCH series:
Posts are the property of One Rhode Island Family.
The post you are reading is located at: https://onerhodeislandfamily.com/2016/09/30/week8-everything-else/
Posted in 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy, Genealogy on August 25, 2016| 5 Comments »
If there’s one thing I’ve realized since I’ve started genealogy, it’s that once you get to military records, you find two wonderful things:
So our job as genealogists is to use all of this great work to give us clues about where to find records.
Rhode Island’s own General Nathanael Greene. His homestead is preserved, see http://www.nathanaelgreenehomestead.org. Copy of mezzotint by Valentine Greene, executed by J. Brown after Peale.
Finding pre-1875 military records for Rhode Island veterans
I am no expert in any of this so I will give some helpful links here and I hope they will be useful. One thing I should say is that for every war that ever affected Rhode Island, there are experts. They may sometimes be hobbyists and their information may be broadcast in unusual ways. Be on the lookout for blogs, particularly blogs written by small groups or organizations, and self-published books. You may find some good leads.
Finding your ancestor’s name may be fairly easy. Finding their story is going to take a lot of digging. Think also of archives, manuscripts, veterans groups, lineage societies, biographical works, and local historical societies.
Helpful tips:
Early wars
King Philip’s War, 1675-1678. Although initially hoping to avoid military engagements with the Narragansetts, Rhode Island did eventually become embroiled in King Philip’s War. Craig Anthony has written some books about Rhode Island’s (and the Tefft family in particular) involvement in a horrific assault that occurred in southern Rhode Island called “The Great Swamp Fight.” After the war, land in East Greenwich, Rhode Island was offered to a group of veterans (see the History of East Greenwich), and nearby Voluntown, Connecticut was founded to distribute land to veterans. I usually refer to Soldiers in King Philip’s War by George M. Bodge for information about the war itself, but no doubt better modern sources are available.
U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph. Painting in oils by W. Nowland Van Powell – Naval Historical Center Photo # NH 85201-KN
French and Indian Wars, 1754-1763. A List of Rhode Island Soldiers & Sailors in the Old French & Indian War, 1755-1762 by Howard Chapin contains some information and names.
Revolutionary War 1776-1783
Rhode Island sent many soldiers to the war. Newport was occupied by the British from late 1776 to 1779, resulting in a severe disruption to the rising importance of Newport, and the eventual emergence of Providence as the center of manufacturing, education and government, although that emergence grew slowly over the next hundred years.
A partial list of resources:
Slips in the Revolutionary War index file for my ancestor Richard Ballou.
War of 1812
A marriage record found in a pension file. From the War of 1812 pension file of Augustus Ballou, Fold3.com.
Mexican War 1846-1848
The most valuable pension record I have ever found for my family, a 96-page document that unlocked the secrets of my gg-grandmother’s birth, was from a Mexican War pension. I had to order it from the National Archives. Try starting on Fold3.com in the Mexican War section, to see if some record may exist. I have now found two Mexican War pensions that were very helpful.
Civil War 1861-1865
Like many Americans, I have relatives on both sides of this war thanks to my Yankee ancestor who got the bright idea to start a business in Alabama in 1852. That did not work out well, but his sons joined the Alabama militia in 1861.
There are, of course, hundreds of possible sources. People are still working on this history and still publishing. Always check for new work. Just as one example, see this essay by Robert Grandchamp and also his book Rhode Island and the Civil War: Voices from the Ocean State and Frank Grzyb’s Hidden History of Rhode Island and the Civil War.
Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, Providence. Photo by Diane Boumenot.
For later wars, even more information should be available through Ancestry.com and Fold3.com. The digital availability of pension records expands all the time; check online first but then order the full record from the National Archives link near the top of this post.
The post you are reading is located at:
https://onerhodeislandfamily.com/2016/08/25/8-weeks-military-and-pensions/
Civil War artillery. From History of the Ninth and Tenth Regiments Rhode Island Volunteers, p. 117.
Posted in 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy, Genealogy, Rhode Island Stuff on July 11, 2016| 13 Comments »
Published compiled genealogies, whether they be books or journal articles, can move our genealogy forward by leaps and bounds. If the material is of poor quality, though, and if we accept it at face value and don’t pursue the research ourselves, it can jeopardize all our future work, sending us down the wrong roads and setting us up to build tree sections that are completely false. If you think about it, there is only one correct family tree for any of us; only one true sequence of events that led to the unique people we are. There is no “close” in genealogy. There is “correct” and “incorrect.” Which is not to say we should or could expect to ever know the full truth, going back a dozen or more generations; there are so many reasons why some “truth” just will not be found by us. But for the parts of the tree we are able to build, we as genealogists want them to be correct.
Published family genealogies – Books
I think one of the first things New England genealogists find are those family genealogies published in the late 1800’s. Googling the name, such as “Ballou genealogy” or “Ballou genealogy book” will usually pull up a pdf of the item, if it exists. My advice would be to download and save such books in folders on your computer, if they relate to your family, and always use the “Comments” feature in Acrobat Reader to mark each page that is significant to you. See more about searching for books on How to Build your Digital Library.
The quality of the genealogy in these books may be excellent, or very poor, and everything in between. My own judgment is that reported events and relationships that occurred within about 60 – 70 years of the publication date have a good chance of being true (or as true as the family wanted to put out there). Events farther back are often:
A good genealogist like Adin Ballou (An Elaborate History and Genealogy of the Ballou Family in America, 1888) may not have used proper footnotes (it was not the custom at the time) but he sprinkled every page with clues as to the sources of his information – deed books with page numbers, dates of probate documents, and many statements like “birth date not found.” If you use data from these books in your tree, always follow up by checking for the records used.
When using these books, always check around for supplements, addenda, and later corrections.
QUICK FACT – When approaching an indexed family genealogy for the first time, seeking information about a couple, a good shortcut is to search for the last name of the spouse instead of the person who holds the name featured in the book (there will be too many of those).
Wait, there are more books
Sadly, the search described above is where many genealogists leave off. Therefore, they miss the thousands of genealogy books, also of varied quality, published since 1923 and, in some cases, still under copyright. A book under copyright will seldom be found as a pdf online. It might be for sale somewhere, it might show up as a Google Book in which only a bit of searching is possible (no pdf available), or, more likely, it is sitting on a few library shelves here and there.
I’m not going to provide a master list of books on Rhode Island families, much as I would like to, and I may try that someday. But here is how I approach this problem.
To compile a list of books that have been published on your family names, try the googling mentioned above, then try these steps:
Searching for “Ballou family” in the Ocean State public library catalog. The entry will tell you which Rhode Island libraries that hold the book.
My best advice for finding ALL the genealogies published on a certain Rhode Island family is to consult this book:
Guide to Published Genealogies has a large alphabetical guide to family history books as well as a guide to town and local histories. Photo by Diane Boumenot.
Compiled genealogy sets covering many families
There are books which serve as guides to the literature of your family’s genealogy, or overviews of the genealogies of large areas.
The Bennett entry in Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island. This is the way the book was printed. I know. It’s weird.
The Great Migration series and Directory. Photo by Diane Boumenot.
Journals and periodicals
Have you ever thought, I wish I could hire one of the country’s top experts to find that elusive ancestor for me? Have you ever considered that you could possibly get such work for free? Here’s how. Do a thorough search of all the genealogy journals that cover the area in question. You need to be sure that your important question has not already been researched by someone really competent, complete with reasoned arguments and footnotes. Even finding an article in a quality journal about the county or town you are researching can be a treasure-trove of sources and strategies. I always read the footnotes first.
Most organizations do not give their journal away online. You need to belong to that society, or subscribe to something that will offer access, or seek out a library with subscriptions. Likewise, just finding an index to each journal is not a trivial problem.
Suggestion 1: If you want to try ONE thing with the biggest chance for success, go to the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s website AmericanAncestors.org and use Search — Databases — Category: Journals & Periodicals. You will need to establish a free guest user account; for some of these, you will need to be an NEHGS member, or find a library with a subscription. This allows you to search the following journals, among others (in many cases, only issues more than five years old are included, and many do not go as far back as the earliest issues.)
Of those, of course, Rhode Island Roots is the most important for Rhode Island research, however, there are some outstanding genealogists producing articles for all the prestigious journals concerning Rhode Island topics. For additional journal suggestions, see this article.
Quality journals.
Suggestion 2: The second easy way to access some quality pre-1990 articles is to locate in a library the four volumes of articles published by the Genealogical Publishing Company, below. Each set contains a thorough index.
The two sets of Genealogies of Rhode Island Familes. Note there is a substantial index at the back of each.
Additional sources
My favorite 10 Rhode Island family genealogies
Of all the genealogies that actually have helped me, these are the ones I recommend most highly. If I had different ancestors, the list would be different. These selections make it clear that helpful genealogies are not always online, and are not always found in book form.
Should you find a book that you would like to purchase, I usually try Higginson Books, Genealogical Publishing, and Heritage Books for reprints. I also look on eBay.com (this valuable book has been waiting a while for a forever home) and Amazon.com, although lately I find older books on Amazon to be overpriced, sometimes ridiculously so (often a more thorough search online for the tiny publisher’s website brings up a much more attractive price than anything you will find on Amazon.com.) In a pinch, my best advice for a local Rhode Island used bookstore is Allison B. Goodsell, Rare Books, also called the Kingston Hill Store.
In closing
Be sure to check out the post about sources of local town records since some of those offer genealogical information about specific families.
The post you are reading is located at:
https://onerhodeislandfamily.com/2016/07/11/8-weeks-week-6-family-genealogies/
A Providence Door-yard. From Sketches of Early American Architecture by O.R. Eggers, 1922.
Posted in 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy, Rhode Island Stuff on June 18, 2016| 8 Comments »
Welcome to 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy Research Week 5 – Town Records, Histories and Newspapers. This covers location-specific books, town records, and newspapers.
Town records
Town records, published histories, and local newspapers are where the stories of our ancestors may be hiding. To know that our ancestors spent one or more generations in a town, and yet know very little about that town, or even worse, to assume we know enough without research, is to ignore our role as family story-finders.
10 things you can find in town records (often called “Council Minutes” or “Town Council Records”)
Always check Rhode Island Roots for various town records and lists transcribed there, and Rhode Island History, published by the Rhode Island Historical Society. Check the card catalog and manuscript finding aids at the Rhode Island Historical Society. A call to the town library with specific content-related questions (e.g., do you know of any local shipbuilding records? Do you have any diaries or old documents from a certain neighborhood?) as well as a search for a local historical house or society is always worth doing. And lastly, the Narragansett Historical Register should be searched.
The major state histories usually describe the development of each early town and the subsequent spun-off towns. These books contain some great illustrations, that might work well in your own family history book if they are no longer under copyright.
MANY original town record books are now included in the new Ancestry.com probate record set for Rhode Island, but it will not be obvious how to find them and they are not likely to be indexed. For a guide and key to navigating those record sets, visit the post on probate records.
Town records and published histories, by town
There are at least five volumes in this set about various East Bay towns, by John G. Erhardt. This volume contained an 1888 newspaper extract about a barn fire at the home of my ggg-grandfather, William Murdock.
This map of 1820 East Greenwich is provided as evidence that King Street, leading down to the bay, was the main thoroughfare of East Greenwich, not Main Street, where my ancestor had a house. That goes a long way to explain how my ancestor could afford such a classy address in 1800 — maybe it wasn’t. Partial snapshot from The History of East Greenwich by McPartland, p. 51.
They just don’t make book titles like they used to. Wickford is a village in North Kingstown.
South Kingston, Rhode Island Tax Lists, 1730-1799. Photo by Diane Boumenot.
You can always join the Rhode Island Genealogical Society and let the experts transcribe and index those town council records for you. One volume per year!
Omitted from the above lists: Architectural and archaeological surveys, church histories, and books about single families. The Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission has issued Preliminary Survey Reports on the archaeology and historic sites of most or all Rhode Island towns. Always check out local historical societies. Some local libraries in Rhode Island also have local history collections. This post on Rhode Island church records will show you the specific church-related vital records that were compiled by James Arnold. And RIAMCO helps you find manuscript materials in Rhode Island repositories.
My favorite two bibliographies of Rhode Island historical materials are:
Columbian Phenix, Providence, Saturday, December 1, 1810. I purchased this on eBay recently. What surprised me about holding the newspaper in my hand was how thick the paper was – just like book paper.
Newspapers
5 things to know about historic Rhode Island newspapers:
See the other 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy posts by clicking the tab at the top of the page.
The post you are reading is located at: https://onerhodeislandfamily.com/2016/06/19/town-histories-and-newspapers/
A card from the Rhode Island index, Providence Public Library. Photo by Diane Boumenot.
Posted in 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy, Rhode Island Stuff on May 1, 2016| 1 Comment »
Property records and the maps that help us understand our ancestor’s location contain some very helpful clues. Even for ancestors whose background we know, maps and deeds can fill in fascinating parts of the story.
Maps
So let me just say right off, even after years in genealogy, I still tend to look at maps too late in the process of research. Maps should be almost the first thing we turn to. Was the village close to the state line, meaning our ancestors’ records may be recorded in another state? Have we checked all neighboring towns for records? Looking at our ancestor’s street on an old map, is it clear which nearby town would have been easiest to walk to, and possibly find a wife in? What was the nearest church? What nearby waterways provided easy transportation or employment?
More and more old maps are coming online. Even if they are for sale, they are often viewable online. Although not listed below, Ancestry.com has also added some of these same maps in the Maps, Atlases and Gazetteers section.
This 1795 Harris map shows the northeast corner of the state where my ancestors lived. I find that by matching landmarks in the old maps (for instance, Abbots Run along the east border) with information in my ancestors’ deeds, I can often come close to knowing the location of their property.
My top 8 online map finds
I was underwhelmed with the selection of digital maps available online, the same few over and over, and lots of state maps showing the names of the towns. I wish more specific content was available for each city and town. Here are the major collections and some of my favorites.
The Georeferencer screen for plate 38 of the 1875 Providence atlas on David Rumsey Maps. It show my ggg-grandfather’s rented home adjacent to Silver Lake Basin, a former body of water that is now a large parking lot with a flea market building (white streets are the current streets). The old map and the new Google map matched together instantly when I pressed the button. Fascinating to see the streets/features that are still the same and the ones that have changed.
Paper maps
Obviously, there are historical maps in paper collections that could be very helpful. The Rhode Island Historical Society has a wide collection.
To buy wall maps, Rhode Island’s own Map Center located on North Main Street, Providence, will sell you reasonably priced maps. Many time over the years, I have purchased CD’s and a few paper maps from the Rhode Island collection at Old Maps including the 1831 & 1855 maps on CD, and the 1870 Atlas on CD. This lets me keep them permanently on my computer, and open them to whatever size I want.
Place names
A guide to Providence County place names is here, mostly pulled from 1600’s records. I will add more sources as I find them.
Deeds and land records
Deeds treat us to a glimpse of our ancestor’s financial and home life. Was it a big farm? Did they have a mortgage? Did they keep the land their parents had, or strike out on their own? Did they lose their property at some point, and why? And most of all, where was this homestead? Does knowing the “abutters” or neighbors clarify a genealogical detail for us? Did your ancestor buy an extremely expensive house in 1798 which he could never, possibly have afforded, lose it in 1800, and then lived the rest of his life in poverty and you cannot figure out how that happened and it keeps you up at night? (but I digress. On with the deeds).
In Rhode Island, deeds are kept in the town that the transaction occurred in. As new towns split over time, deeds tended to remain in the original town, although there are exceptions to that so always check the town website to see what deeds they hold.
VERY few deeds are online at this point, as you will see, below. So it’s important to get out to the town halls or rent the microfilm from the Family History Library. They have most pre-1900 deeds on film which you can rent, and read at your local Family History Center. Most likely you will have to rent the index volume microfilm first, and the volumes you need, later after you use the index. To find those deeds go to http://www.familysearch.org, use the Search — Catalog menu item and then “Search by” place, pulling up the exact town, which will look something like this: “United States, Rhode Island, Kent, Coventry.” Familysearch files all deed records under the term “Land and property.”
Finding microfilm listings for Smithfield, Rhode Island, prior to ordering them.
Online deeds
It may not be widely known that slowly, some Rhode Island towns are moving their deeds online and in a few cases, that includes historical deeds. Check this site for the town you are interested in, although you may also need to consult the town/city web page to find out which years are in that system.
I am finding no deeds on Ancestry.com, however, a few deeds drifted into the “probate” category – look over at the Week 3 post on Probate, and follow instructions there to pull up the record set.
A few towns have a few deeds on FamilySearch.org:
Lydia Lamphere signed a deed of sale (with her mark) because she was required to give up her right of dower in the property that she and her husband sold.
Some additional helpful sources:
The post you are reading is located at: https://onerhodeislandfamily.com/2016/05/01/8-weeks-4-maps-and-deeds/
East Greenwich deed index, town hall.
Posted in 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy, Providence, Rhode Island Stuff on April 15, 2016| 8 Comments »
Great news! Ancestry.com has recently posted over 800 record sets related to Rhode Island probate. They are listed at the bottom of this post. There is so much more there than I thought; see the top of the list for instructions about finding each record set.
Wills and probate
Wills and probate records can tell us about relationships in our ancestor’s lives that no other document can reveal. Cemetery markers, even if read and recorded long ago, can often be the only physical artifact left behind to tell us about a life.
Probate won’t reliably provide us with helpful lines such as “I give the land received from my honored father, Marmaduke Shipley, to …” But they reveal so much else. Often naming all surviving children, who may have the very grandparents’ names we are seeking. Or showing us the choice of Administrator or Guardians of minor children; were those significant people known to us? Evidence of economic status can help us in building a case for a certain father as opposed to another by the same name. And don’t get me started on the probate records of childless adults – they were often required to name every relative.
More than anything, it’s funny how the documents of the dead can bring them to life. Two aprons left to a daughter. An iron kettle. A chiming clock. A cow and calf. Or, in the case of my New England ancestors, 3 barrels of hard cider in the cellar. Add to that proximity in the cemetery to extended family members, or to the original family farm, and these are very important records for genealogists.
Asa Aldrich’s 1818 will as recorded in Cumberland, R.I. probate.
All probate records were kept by the town, although be careful about shifting town identities. A huge set of these records is now available online through a paid account on Ancestry.com (see bottom of this post). Otherwise, to see the probate records you need, a visit to the town hall may be necessary. Each town hall usually has staff devoted to probate records, to take care of the current probate business, and they can help you find the old records.
In some cases, microfilm copies may be necessary if the files you need are not online or if you cannot get to a town hall. The Rhode Island Historical Society has a few town probate records (try the card catalog before leaving home), also the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston. Microfilm for most towns can be rented and viewed at the local FamilySearch Center.
There are some index/abstracts published in a few places.
Quick tip: Since probate usually was processed over a period of time, there is often more than one entry in the town probate books. Check for additional records. Also, different parts of probate may have been saved separately – for instance, wills, inventories or guardianship papers may have their own volumes.
Family Search.org has a miscellaneous collection of Rhode Island probate records. To find them, go to SEARCH –> CATALOG, and use Place = “United States, Rhode Island,” subject = “Probate,” Search these Family History Centers = “Online.” Then drill down to the exact location using the “PART OF UNITED STATE, RHODE ISLAND, PROVIDENCE” link to go to Providence County, the use “Places within …” to find the town of your choice. Clicking around will bring up any of the counties, and from there, the towns.
Quick tip: Don’t assume that because there is a probate record for your ancestor, the death must have been recorded in the town records. Sometimes, probate is the only record of a death. And sometimes, a death was recorded but there were no probate activities.
Of course there are many other records associated with more recent deaths – I notice Ancestry.com has a growing collection of Funeral Home records. Obituaries will be covered later, with newspapers.
Ballou Cemetery, Cumberland.
Cemeteries
Rhode Island has many, many tiny old cemeteries. Early on, with no central church to manage burials, families tended to use a spot on their own property for a private cemetery. Later, more formal, locally managed cemeteries were created, and sometime, older burials were moved to newer cemeteries, so don’t let the date of establishment of a cemetery fool you. As land use changed and towns expanded, conditions were not ideal for protection and care of these small cemeteries, so those seeking out these graves today sometimes have difficult conditions to grapple with.
Over the years, and today, there were many dedicated individuals recording and caring for small cemeteries. Sometimes, those early recordings have become the only record of markers now fallen and buried.
William Hardman died in 1870. R.I. Historical Cemetery Database is telling me that he is buried in PV005 – Grace Church Cemetery.
Rhode Island probate records on Ancestry.com
And now, a list of records that I am going to be pursuing for months. Recently, Ancestry.com posted some records online: Rhode Island, Wills and Probate Records, 1582-1932. There are selected record sets (from microfilm rolls) from 37 of Rhode Island’s 39 cities and towns. The set for Providence is huge. An example is below.
Widow Margaret Hardman served as administrator of her husband William’s estate in 1870. I like how the bottom navigation bar shows me which file I’m on. The actual will was signed with a shaky hand on August 12, 1870, the day of William’s death.
You could search the set by name (see Randy Seaver’s recent post about indexing and other problems with the Massachusetts set). But if you want to access specific books to check for yourself, Ancestry makes it cumbersome but it is possible. All record sets are filed alphabetically BY COUNTY – but Rhode Island probate is kept by town. The titles never include the name of the town, so, I have gone through each county and sorted the titles into the proper town. I doubt my list of over 800 record sets is perfect, and the titles themselves may have issues, but the list is below. I built it for myself because I can’t think of any other way to access these records.
Rhode Island, Wills and Probate Records, 1582-1932. Choose the county then look for the exact title.
First, find the titles you are interested in, below. Then go to Rhode Island, Wills and Probate Records, 1582-1932. Find on the screen the “Browse this collection” link in the side column. Choose a county. Then all record books for the county will appear in the drop down menu (Providence county takes a while to come up – be patient). Knowing, from the list below, the exact title you might want, you just look for that title and select it. Be careful because some of the titles are VERY similar. Good luck!
A three-minute VIDEO walking you through how to locate the Ancestry.com records is available HERE. Be sure to click the blue button with the triangle to start the video. And don’t forget to come back!
BRISTOL COUNTY [All titles below will be found in a single list for Bristol County – this list helps you find the title you want.]
Barrington
Bristol
Warren
KENT COUNTY [All titles below will be found in a single list for Kent County – this list helps you find the title you want.]
Coventry
East Greenwich
Warwick
West Greenwich
West Warwick
NEWPORT COUNTY [All titles below will be found in a single list for Newport County – this list helps you find the title you want.]
Jamestown
Little Compton
Middletown
Newport
Portsmouth
Tiverton
MISC:
PROVIDENCE COUNTY [All titles below will be found in a single list for Providence County – this list helps you find the title you want.]
Burrillville
Cranston
Cumberland
East Providence
Foster
Gloucester
Johnston
Lincoln
North Providence see Pawtucket
North Smithfield
Pawtucket or North Providence (these records are for one or the other; it was hard to distinguish)
Providence
Scituate
Smithfield
Woonsocket
Misc from Rhode Island Historical Society:
WASHINGTON COUNTY [All titles below will be found in a single list for Washington County – this list helps you find the title you want.]
Charlestown
Exeter
Hopkinton (lucky Hopkinton researchers can bypass all this by using the transcribed records from the Hopkinton Historical Association (free!) – Probate 1757-1850 HERE).
Narragansett
New Shoreham
North Kingstown
Richmond
South Kingstown
Westerly
A bit more help
A demo of the steps needed to use the record sets, above, can be found here on Randy Seaver’s blog. Thanks Randy!
The post you are reading is located at:
https://onerhodeislandfamily.com/2016/04/15/8-weeks-probate-and-cemeteries/
Posted in 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy, Genealogy, Rhode Island Stuff on March 31, 2016| 11 Comments »
Welcome to Week Two of 8 Weeks to Better Rhode Island Genealogy Research: Census Records. Census records are an important way to keep track of our ancestors, and they provide one of the few long-term views of our ancestors’ comings and goings. Finding family in the 1940 federal census, and working back from there, can get almost anyone started in U.S. genealogy.
Federal Census records
The following federal census records should be available for our Rhode Island ancestors (links go to the record set on FamilySearch.org):
These census records are also available on many other genealogy websites and the list is growing all the time. I keep the census headers nearby at all times because they are often unreadable on digital census pages. I like these from Familysearch wiki (although they don’t include 1940) and I managed to add them to my two desktop backgrounds (using Picasa) so I always know where to find them.
Federal census headers as screen backgrounds. It actually took me a while to accomplish this.
Have you ever thought about which VERSION of the federal census page you are seeing? I love this article by Rhode Island genealogist Jeffrey Howe: Shortcomings of the 1850 Census by Jeffrey Howe, Rhode Island Roots 24:3/4 (Sep/Dec) p. 259-264. And this warning from Cherry Fletcher Bamberg: Navigating the Shoals of the 1810 Census and Beyond, Rhode Island Roots 37:1 (Mar 2011) p. 13-16. Census pages were copied over, reproduced, filmed, and distributed in many different ways. It’s important to think about whether we could, perhaps, find a better version.
Quick tip: If the federal census page you find online is problematic (blurry, too light, too dark, part seems cut off), try accessing another copy of the census through Internet Archive. Go to http://www.archive.org. Search in Books for “census”, county, state, year. For instance, “census Kent Rhode Island 1880” brings up this screen:
A search on Internet Archive brings up a DIFFERENT copy of the census, from a microfilm which must be paged through. But speed up your browsing by noting the page number on the census page you already have.
when you open the reel, you have to browse through it. Get the page number from the original census you saw, to help you find the right page quickly. Archive.org doesn’t have everything, though.
Quick tip: What with bad handwriting, fuzzy images and faulty indexing (and believe me I have won the trifecta on that a few times), you may find on occasion that you need to pull up a location and go PAGE BY PAGE, looking at every name. There’s a badge for that, I think. It’s called genealogist. So, good job! The links above would work well for that because you can go to BROWSE and narrow it down to the town.
One last thought: because Rhode Island is a small state, I was able to acquire compiled volumes of the federal census years 1790, 1800, 1810, and 1820 for Rhode Island rather cheaply as used books. These are very handy for seeing a whole town on just a few pages. Particularly for cases where spelling is unpredictable, like Lamphere, it can be better than searching. 1790 is a 1977 reprint by Genealogical Publishing, complete with a fold-out map, of what is a fairly complete transcription [or see a pdf version by the Census Bureau HERE]. 1800 is an index by Lowell M. Volkel. My 1810 and 1820 index books are by Ronald Vern Jackson.
There’s nothing like seeing every name for a town on just a few pages in these old compiled census volumes for 1790, 1800, 1810, and 1820.
Rhode Island Census records
Rhode Island enumerated the state population in the “-5” years, between the federal census years. Some of those survive. In the colonial era, a few census-like records were made. To get a more detailed listing of early census records, don’t miss the words of wisdom on the R.I. census records at the Rhode Island Genealogical Society website.
Colonial era census records
The most commonly used Rhode Island colonial census records are for 1774, 1777, and 1782. A list of sworn freemen, compiled 1747-1755, also serves as a kind of census.
Here are four books often seen in libraries:
There are also newer transcriptions of the 1774 and 1782 census that are more faithful to the originals. Try finding the better 1782 transcriptions here and the re-transcribed 1774 census records printed, town by town, over a period of several years in Rhode Island Roots, volumes 29-35.
State census records 1790-present
Although not a census, the remaining fragments of the 1798 Direct Tax records (a federal fundraising effort administered by the states) can be very valuable for finding homeowners if your town’s records survive. This is available at the Rhode Island Historical Society – Robinson Research Center. Portions of the Newport lists are here at Internet Archive.
Rhode Island state census records are available for 1865, 1875, 1885, 1905, 1915, 1925, and 1935. Each census is quite different. 1895 did not survive (so, that was unlucky).
My 4x great grandparents, the Lawrences, beautifully enumerated in Providence in 1865.
The 1865 census pages can be found on Ancestry.org. This page will allow you to search most of these Rhode Island State Census years. Note that 1905 is not in that collection.
This is the FamilySearch.org screen showing the front of Catherine Ross’ card. But the transcription provides place of birth of parents for the PREVIOUS card. Click through to the card, then click to the next page, to see the REAL info on the back of Catherine’s card.
Warning: FamilySearch.org is the only place I know to get the 1905 census online, but each record is indexed with some wrong information. Place of birth of the two parents is taken from the PREVIOUS card. To see the real data on the back of your card, click through to view the front more closely, then use the circled arrow in the top corner to click to the NEXT card; that will be the back of your card. Search here on FamilySearch.org.
My great grandparents, Russell and Eva Darling, living very near to her parents, Louis and Jessie Murdock at 337 Friendship Street in Providence, as seen in the 1915 census. They have a friend, Mabel, boarding with them too.
My grandfather Miles Baldwin, captured with his mysterious first wife Mary in the 1925 census at 93 Somerset Street, Providence.
The first example shows Uncle Charlie born in Germany.
Second example of the 1935 census shows Uncle Charlie born in New York. I’m really not blaming the census taker, I’m sure he or she wrote what they were told.
Access the 1935 census on familysearch.org and on the link for Ancestry.com.
In closing
These local census records need close examination and study, but they can fill out your ancestor’s story beyond what is seen every ten years in the federal census. I encourage everyone to explore them fully.
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Diane MacLean Boumenot
