from the Ancestry Daily News
  Michael John Neill – 12/31/2002

My 1930 Census Experiences

To be perfectly candid, I was not too excited about the 1930 census when it was released on 1 April 2002. I did not expect it to reveal any significant information on my family members. Consequently, I did not rush out to view the microfilm. When the images were released on Ancestry.com, I searched for the "easy" families, paging through the actual images. For the remaining entries, I decided to wait for the index.

Initial Searching
I quickly located my four rural grandparents, all of whom were still living "at home" in 1930. Three were easily located by searching the same township in which their family was enumerated in 1920. My paternal grandmother, whose family moved several times during the 1920-30 time period was located by searching several townships along Hancock-Adams County, Illinois, line. When the families are rural and don't move often or very far, it is not too difficult to find them in the census.

It was a slightly different situation with my wife's grandparents.

One grandmother was located in Rock Island, Illinois. Her father was located in several city directories around the 1930 time frame. I determined what enumeration districts these addresses were located in. I then searched the census images for these enumeration districts manually, until the desired family was located. This is the approach one typically takes when searching an un-indexed census—determine the address or area of residence as precisely as possible and go from there. I was not able to do that with my wife's other grandparents.

For the remaining three, I decided to wait until the census index at Ancestry.com came out. One grandparent was living in one of several Illinois counties in the west-central portion of the state. Two others were living in the greater Chicago area.

Tracking Down All The Siblings
Once I had access to the index, I decided to broaden my search. I tried to locate as many of my children's ancestors and their siblings as possible in the 1930 census. This was not an easy task. My wife and I both have grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents who were alive in 1930. I started with the grandparents on my side of the family. After about an hour of searching, I located all my grandparent's siblings, except for one brother of my paternal grandmother (whom I still cannot locate). My search for my paternal grandmother and her siblings resulted in more information than I expected.

Finding Grandma Twice
I found my grandmother, Ida Trautvetter, living with her parents and her younger brother in Keene Township, Adams County, Illinois in 1930. The family was located by a manual search of the census before the index was released. There were five older siblings living in the same general area. I decided to wait until the release of the index. The surname, Trautvetter, frequently gets rendered into several other forms. As a result, a Soundex search was conducted for the surname Trautvetter in Adams County, Illinois, where the family was centered. Fourteen hits were returned. Two results were for Soundex equivalents of the name Trautvetter that were not spelling variants typically encountered. Based upon the first names of the others, the remaining eleven results were all extended members of Grandma's Trautvetter family.

As I scanned down the list, I noticed three listings for Ida Trautvetter, with ages 56, 18, and 19. There really should have been two: my grandmother and her mother. The oldest was my grandmother's mother and the eighteen year old was my grandmother, as enumerated in her parent's household. The entry for the nineteen year old intrigued me: it was for an Ida L. Trautvetter, aged 19.

My grandmother's middle name was Laura and her actual age at the time of the census would have been 19.

This Ida was listed as a servant in the index and I thought I had the answer to my question before I ever looked at the image. I knew that my grandmother started "working out" at a relatively young age and that she continued "working out" until her marriage to my grandfather in 1935. The Ida L. entry is in a township adjacent to the township where her parents were enumerated in 1930. I'm pretty certain it is the same person for several reasons: