1885 Census Transcription Project
While everyone who worked on the copying, transcription and proofreading effort deserves great credit, three people stood out above the crowd. Those are Rod and Marsena Smith who transcribed over 180 pages and Jennie Merritt who single-handedly proofed over 200 of the 350 pages. Their efforts account for well over half the total work. Without their tremendous output I don’t think we would ever have completed this census transcription. Certainly not in the three-year period it took to actually do it.
This original census was conducted by several enumerators and apparently large parts of it were re-transcribed into a more or less alphabetical order at a later time. It is this latter, re-transcribed census copy that survives. This alphabetizing effort, of course, destroyed the relational clues among neighbors and families in those reordered areas. Mothers who remarried have their early children listed in a different place in the census and relations with different last names living with family members are no longer shown with the family.
Some of the enumerators had handwriting so poor that some names and occupations are mere guesses on the part of both transcribers and proofreaders. Most of these are marked with a “?” but not all. So, if you don’t see your ancestors in here, try looking for name variations in the index and hope we got the first few letters right or try searching by first name or known children’s names.
Don’t use this transcription for your final family history input without verifying the correctness of the actual parts you are using. Look up the original census. We may have hard-to-read ages wrong or places of birth misidentified. Again, it was a challenging piece of work to transcribe with 100 percent accuracy. Still, I am confident that more than 95 percent of it is completely correct. But there are errors.
As the enumerators passed back and forth across Pensacola’s city limits they made entries in the left most columns indicating that fact. We have entered these notations as well. By using these notations you can tell who in this census was in the city, the naval reserve or the country.
In some places everyone’s birth month is listed, even some actual birth dates are listed, too. In other places the enumerator left out places of birth altogether. It’s a mix and match effort throughout the enumeration. In addition, there are many homespun abbreviations and shorthand notations in the original census. For instance, an entry like “6mo” in the age column indicates a child 6 months old. Often their birth month is listed in the following column. In the Health columns entries are listed starting in the applicable block and stretching across columns to the right if there were no other entries in those columns. If there were entries, a double row was used to preserve the data by text wrapping.