The 1950 Census Follies!

As I indicated in The 1950 Census Blues, in my previous post, I looked forward to looking for and finding myself in the census.  1950 was also the first appearance in a census for my late brother, who passed away in 1996.  So both of us in our first census was special to me.

 Then the "fun" began.  Looking for was one thing.  Finding was something else entirely.

My mother and father never owned a house.  While he was alive, he always rented.  Part of that habit was due to bouncing from job to job.  He had some engineering jobs, opportunities to use his degree in engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy.  He had other jobs, as well.  But the movements of the family looked like migration on steriods -- or on meth!  Between the end of World War II and my father's dischage from the Navy, and 1954 when he died, my dad had the family bouncing between California and Florida nearly every year.  And in between, the family didn't stay put within the locality, either.  Tracking all this down was a real detective story, and this census is only part of that picture, I have developed a keen empathy with ping-pong balls!  I'm also amazed that my mother didn't divorce him for making her pack up and unpack at least once a year, if not more!

So frequent relocation is part of this picture of why it was so doggone difficult to find my family in the 1950 census!

The other part has been both frustrating and outrageously entertaining!  And both of these diametrically opposed concepts have sprung from the National Archives' experiment in allowing an AI to do the first run of indexing the census. Our younger daughter correctly insists that AI is not the proper term.  The proper term, she says, is "machine learing," because the thing may be long on artificial, but it sure is short on intelligence!

The machine learning is mangling names most hilariously. I have told relatives about the manglings.  A cousin working on a Master of Fine Arts degree is writing a novel, and she took one of the name manglings for a character in her novel.  And oh, did it ever do a number on my father's name.  My father's name was Arden Packard.  

The machine rendered -- and believe me, rendered is the exact right word -- his name as . . . wait for it . . .  Urden Pucbard.

I laughed for a solid hour, partly at the relief of having finally found my family -- and me and my brother -- in the census, but mostly at the utter absurdity of Urden Pucbard!

Also entertaining is the machine's mangling my brother's name, Ned, as Nee.  It put my brother's son (and me) immediately in mind of that immortal Monty Python schtick: the Knights who say Ni!

But unfortunately, there is a serious side to the entertainment, sad to say.  Not only is the machine learning or AI or whatever you choose to call it mangling names to an absolutely absurd degree, it is also: 

• skipping individuals 
• skipping entire households
• conflating information on two different lines

 Thus, there are some people who, unless the entire census is transcribed by us human beings who are doing so, will have little chance of finding their family in the 1950 census.

 

Accuracy counts.

 

 

  

 Ten years ago, I sang Those 1940 Census Blues.  Talk about history -- or genealogy -- repeating itself.  Now I'm singing the blues again.

The 1950 Census Blues

Early this morning of April First,

Excited and happy, about to burst,

Up and online before the sun:

It's the 1950 census, gonna have some fun!

Oh, I'm so blue.  I'm walkin' the floor.

The 1950 census blues walked right in that door.

I've reached an age where I'd appear

In that census of that mid-way year.

Lookin' for that thrill of seeing myself there.

But I can't find my family anywhere!

Oh, I'm so blue.  I'm walkin' the floor.

The 1950 census blues walked right in that door.

I even had an address out there in old L.A.

Where my parents should have been, if only they had stayed.

But when I found the address on that census sheet,

The people who were there we never did meet.

Oh, I'm so blue.  I'm walkin' the floor.

The 1950 census blues walked right in that door.

Can't find ma and pa, maybe my grandma and aunt.

Clear away on the other side of this big continent.

Oh!  My heart breaks when those dismal words were shown:

As the census paper tells me there ain't no one at home!

Oh, I'm so blue.  I'm walkin' the floor.

The 1950 census blues walked right in that door.

Looks to me like I have only one sad destiny.

If ever I survive to 85, I know what I will see.

I'll walk the floor enough to wear away my shoes,

'Cause I know I'll be wailin' 1960 census blues!

A to Z Challenge On the Move: G is for Genographic

Several years ago, the National Geographic Society launched an ambitious program to study the DNA of volunteers more deeply than any other DNA study. They went back hundreds of thousands of years, tracing DNA changes that gave a picture of the proto-migrations of the ancestors of these volunteers, including me.

For some reason, earlier this year, they shut the program down.  

But wow -- you wanna talk about migrations?

My DNA reveals, first of all, that I am 2.1% Neanderthal and 1.1% Denisovan.  This led some waggish friend of mine to state that this means I am 3.2% extinct.  Sometimes I feel like it.

It also means my ancestors range from France and Germany to Siberia, where the offshoot Denisovan branch was found in a series of caves, the Denisova Caves.

According to the National Geographic Society's study, the Genographic Project, "Most non-Africans are about 2 percent Neanderthal and slightly less than 2 percent Denisovan."  Proof that Homo Sapiens and these cousins of theirs did interbreed.

These migrations are of my maternal line, since females do not receive the Y chromosome from their fathers; only sons do.  

Our DNA carries genetic markers, records in the DNA of mutations that occurred as new DNA was added to the mixture that is us.

Note to White Supremacists:  You are not as lily-white as you like to think you are.

The first marker in my DNA is referred to as Branch L3, and originated in East Africa around 67,000 years ago.  It is one of two lineages of the first modern humans (homo sapiens) to leave Africa and go north or east.  My folks got in early on the migration thing!

Within L3 marker carriers developed Haplogroup N, one of two groups produced by those L3 ancestors.  That was about 60,000 years ago.  Some ended up in parts of East Asia, others in southern Europe.

Possibly the first family squabble, though a genetic one rather than social, economic, religious, or political in origin, came when Haplogroup R arose out of Haplogroup N, about 55,000 years ago in West Asia. 

These two groups lived and migrated together, and their descendants "dominate the European maternal landscape, making up 75 to 95 percent of the lineages there."

Hi, cousin!

Then, about 25,000 years ago, Haplogroup T arose out of R.  This is the bunch credited with the development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, in the Middle East.  These people spread all over, carrying their newly developed agriculture with them. 

Then came T2, about 19,000 years ago in West Asia.  It spread across Anatolia (Turkey and its neighbors) and into Europe.  This group is found in such varied places as Iraq (21% of maternal lineage), Croatia (16%), Greece (11%), Belgium (15%), Denmark (13%), and Switzerland (11%), among others.  My mother has proven Swiss ancestry.

Finally, there's T2b, arising around 10,000 years ago, again in West Asia.  It also went all over Eastern and Western Europe.  It constitutes about 5% of the population of the British Isles, where my ancestors on both sides came from in the 1600s and 1700s.

My recent regional ancestry -- between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago -- is an interesting mix indeed.

I am:

45% Northern European.  That's no surprise, really.

37% Mediterranean.  That is a surprise, but it includes Iberia, and maybe explains my fondness for and facility with the Spanish language.

16% Southwest Asian.  Total surprise!  This includes the Arabian Peninsula, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Tajikistan.  Wow.

2% Northeast Asian.  Another surprise.  This includes Japan, China, and Mongolia.

Well, there I am.  More of a mixture than I would ever have thought.  

I used to be impressed by my ancestors' migrations from Europe (mostly English, possibly Scots and/or Irish, and that little bit of Swiss) and across Canada and the United States.  This totally blows it away!

The Genographic Project came under fire from indigenous peoples as racist, but I don't see it that way.  In fact, it has shown me that there is no such thing as a "pure" lineage, or a "pure" race, as we all carry parts of many different peoples within us.  I like that.  I think it makes us way more interesting.  I think it points up what I hold to be true: there is but one race -- the human race.

It is a real pity that the NGS cancelled the Genographic Project.  I would have loved to know more.
 

A to Z Challenge On the Move: F is for Florida

In the 20th century, members of both sides of my family -- the Packards (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Canada, Illinois, California) and the Reeds (Ohio and Indiana) -- have ended up in Florida.

My mother, born in Detroit, ended up in Florida as a child in 1920, and was raised here.  Her adoptive father was a railroad freight agent in Pensacola.  My father came to Florida after graduating from the Naval Academy and service on aircraft carriers, for flight training in 1937.  He was born in California.

They married here, and their oldest child, my sister, was born here in 1938.  My brother was born here in 1942, when my father came back to Florida, stationed in Miami.  

We spent time here as a family in the early 1950s, as my father took various engineering jobs in Jacksonville and in Pensacola.  Then we went back to California, as my father's family was there.

Finally, my mother brought my sister, my brother, and me back to Florida after Dad died, to be with her adoptive mom and sister for help with raising us.   That was in 1954.  Mom's biological sister and brother also lived in Florida.  Later, a Packard aunt and uncle also relocated to Florida.

Though I was born in California, I have lived most of my life here, and now I consider myself "Floridated."

Within Florida, my husband and I have taken our family from Jacksonville, where he was born and raised, and where our older daughter was born, to St. Petersburg, where our younger daughter was born while my husband was stationed there in the Coast Guard.

After he was released from active duty, we returned to Jacksonville.  We lived there several years, then made a short migration to the county just south-southwest of Jacksonville, where we live now.  

During our time in our present home, we have separately spent time outside of Florida.  My husband took a special assignment in the Coast Guard that had him living in New Orleans for a year, then he spent almost another year in Washington, D.C., in connection with that same special assignment.  I spent a month in Seville, Spain and almost two years back in St. Petersburg, earning a master's degree at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

Our older daughter married a man who was also born in Jacksonville, and their son was also born there.  After all our peregrinations, we've become a Florida family.