Census?? cant understand the names??

Question

http://content.ancestry.co.uk/iexec/?htx=view&r=5538&dbid=8059&iid=GLARG11_5283_5286-0085&fn=Amy&ln=Harrison&st=r&ssrc=&pid=5420688

That is the link

Im looking at harrison, francis and ann harrison

im asking because it mentions an Amy harrison? but I have no record of her what so ever, I look at the census and it dont even look like Amy? can anyone help me please

Answer 1

It's pretty common for a census record to be hard to read. Spellings are often wrong and sometimes the name is wrong. In the example of my family the names seem to change overtime. Leroy becomes Lee, Kate becomes Kate or Terese becomes Ressie. In the 1860 census my great grandfather is shown as Lycurgus. We believe that his father either had a sense of humor and a classical education. Try to use the information that is presented age, other family members and the location to prove you have the right person and then go to a prior or later census and see if the information changes to the name you are seeking or is another form of the same name.

Answer 2

Ancestry's indexes were put together by cheap foreign labour in India, who were reading the census to the best of their ability.  To some, English isn't even their first language, while others have no idea of English geography or surnames at all and just include a "best guess".  To their credit, most of their guesses are right, or by entering any possible near sound-a-like variants one can usually find a family miscrecorded like this, and spelling errors do occur.  If I can't find one family member in the census, I try all the other known family members and hope that at least one of them is recorded correctly.  Even people who can read 19th century handwriting struggle with certain names and addresses on the census.  You have to learn to be creative.  I've got many family members who changed their birthplace between censuses and others (mainly women) who never aged a complete ten years between each one.  Opportunities for errors are legion.

That weblink is not working for me, probably because I don't have a valid Ancestry subscription at the moment.  I use PPV as and when I need it, so all I'm getting is the signup page to purchase credits.  It might not work for anyone else either unless they have a full subscription, and even possibly if they do.  You may have to be more specific with name, age and place so someone can find the census page for themselves and give an opinion.

Answer 3

Try f***y !

The ennumerator has T F S and J's that look similar and the transcriber has not noticed that there is one of these before the A. They have assumed capital A's are giant lower case ones which they often were but not in this instance.

Answer 4

A tip for you, Townie.. I have taken images from the internet, saved them as a jpeg file.  Then, opened them in a photo editing program which will not only zoom in, but you can play with the contrast.  It "might" help.  Definitely a life saver on maps, to zoom on them.

Answer 5

Okay I cheated and looked for the family in 1891.

http://content.ancestry.co.uk/iexec/?htx...

If this is right family Amy = f***y

Answer 6

I'll keep my original answer but on second thought, it does appear to be f***y.

That's definitely Amy Harrison there.  I'm used to reading these from doing research myself, however, if you study the way the censustaker wrote other letters on the page, A m y all match.  I see there's a squiggly mark in front of "Amy" that looks like J or F Amy, but you also see that on the line below, too, with the name Francis.

Look at line 12 of the names.  It says:

Amy do

"do" means duplicate.  The head of the household is

Francis Harrison

Ann do   wife

Charles do  son

Harriet do  daughter

Sylvia? do  daugher

Amy do      daughter

Naylis? do  son

Answer 7

The link you have posted is to a site ( Ancestry) which does not allow non-members to see "subscribers only" details...

Go here, it has hundreds of thousands of Census records from both the UK and the US available, type in your information as you read it (you can even use wildcards) and What looks like Amy might actually be "Anny". It is well known that records from the UK at that time were just more than hard to read...they even got surnames completely wrong! This site is FREE.

http://www.familysearch.org/