52 Ancestors 2026: What the Census Suggests – Harvesting a Wealth of Information from the Agricultural Schedules

When I began my genealogy research in the mid-1990s, I read whatever family histories I could find—mostly on the Fast line. The books I consulted advised that serious research required a trip to the National Archives to examine census records. Living in the Washington, DC, area, that was not a great stretch, and I spent several Saturdays downtown searching indexes, retrieving microfilm, and parking myself at a reader to transcribe information.

With the arrival of this century, those census records moved online. I could suddenly search for and download page after page of schedules from home. I made more discoveries than I can count—finding and tracing my ancestors, and even uncovering small stories along the way, such as my grandfather’s wandering ways.

One of my most intriguing discoveries, however, was the set of Missouri Agricultural Schedules. As my families settled in Barton County, these records revealed how much land they cultivated, which crops they planted, what livestock they relied on, and the income and value generated by their labor. For a researcher, the Agricultural Schedules—combined with the Population Schedules—are a gold mine.

I entered the data from the 1860, 1870, and 1880 agricultural schedules into spreadsheets for each census year and began analyzing the patterns. This is where my ChatGPT assistant proved especially helpful. By uploading the spreadsheets, I could ask it to interpret the data—examining livestock numbers and crop variety to suggest whether a farm was still in its early clearing stage (with many oxen) or had matured into a more diversified operation (with a wider range of crops and livestock).

For example, I followed the farm of my second-great-grandparents, the Currys, from 1860 through 1880—and, through the Population Schedules, to 1910. The records tell the story of a modest family farm that, after the death of the father, Robert, was maintained by his widow, with later assistance from their children. The postbellum years also brought new migrants to Barton County: the Fasts (John Jay and his son William Marion) and two Union Army veterans, Ben McWilliams and David Cassatt. These newcomers appear to have prospered more quickly—perhaps because they came from more established northern farms or because their wartime experiences provided both means and determination.

The Agricultural Schedules do more than measure family wealth. They describe how farmers lived—growing grain to feed livestock, producing butter and eggs for household use and market, raising hogs and poultry for home consumption, and fattening cattle for transport to the nearest railhead.

These records do not tell American history from the perspective of Great Men, but from the collective experience of ordinary families. Who lived on the farm, what labor each person could contribute, and the value of their industry—these details tell powerful stories about our ancestors, even when they left no written accounts of their own.

52 Ancestors 2026: What This Story Means to Me – Working the Coal Mines

 

I am very fortunate that one of my cousins, Cindy Cruz, is an ace genealogist who has devoted her time and talents to researching our shared McWilliams line. I have written earlier about my 2nd-great-grandfather, Benjamin Cruiser McWilliams, who left behind a wealth of stories about his service for the Union cause during the Civil War and his efforts to make something of himself afterward.

The McWilliams family were Scots-Irish, and the original McWilliams immigrant, William, hailed from County Armagh and made his way to Pennsylvania sometime before 1750, eventually settling in Northumberland County in northern Appalachia. By the mid-1700s, the best land in William Penn’s colony was already settled by Quaker landowners, whose descendants worked the land themselves or hired tenant farmers, so later immigrants headed for the hills. It was not long before these Scots-Irish began to intermingle and intermarry with German settlers. It is with William’s grandson, also named William, that this story begins.

William married Frances (Fannie) Knauss in 1843 and began raising a family. With their eldest son, Ben, serving in the Union Army, the family moved to Shamokin, Pennsylvania, where William and his sons found work on the railroad and in the coal mines.

In his memoirs, Ben—now twenty-two years old—described his new start after being mustered out of the Army in 1865:

When I arrived at home, Shamokin, where my parents now lived, I wanted a job of work. My father and one brother was then working on the railroad, while my other two brothers were working in the coal breakers. I went on the railroad for a couple of days and that didn’t suit me. I then got to be car loader at the Enterprise Colliery four miles East of Shamokin. Here I got the best job I ever had in my life.

He continued:

Each coal company had their own houses for their employees to live in. My father moved up to Shamokin the Spring of '66 and was made slatepicker boss at the Enterprise colliery. The coal as it came from the mines went through rollers and was broken up and run through screens which assorted it out into different sizes and dropped out into chutes which run down past the boys, “Slatepickers,” who picked out the slate as the coal passed in front of them. We worked ten hours per day, excepting Saturdays when we worked eight. I stayed here until the sixth day of July, 1866, when I started West.

I went first to Belleview, where my uncle and family lived, helped Sam Knauss [Samuel Knauss, 1840–1924] take care of his grain, then his sister Lib Knauss [Elizabeth Ann “Libbie” Knauss Boyer, 1837–1908] went to Michigan to Andy Billmeyer [Andrew Billmeyer III, 1827–1910], who lived at Clinton, both of them my mother’s cousins. I accompanied her from here there. I stayed there a couple of weeks hunting and fishing, then struck out for Missouri the latter part of August.

This story is fascinating on many levels. First, thanks to Cindy’s research, we gain a clear picture of the hard life this family endured. Second, we see Ben at the beginning of what became a lifetime of moving from one opportunity to the next—a journey that took him from Pennsylvania to Iowa to Missouri, where he eventually became a successful farmer. Third, we see the importance of family. In his memoirs, Ben described traveling throughout the East and Midwest to visit relatives who had moved west, and ultimately his own family’s relocation to Missouri. Finding their names on the FamilySearch tree was like finding buried treasure!

Finally, this is a story about the different stages of immigration. Early settlers in these Appalachian mountains came largely from the British Isles and Germany. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe, including Poland and Ukraine. These successive waves of immigration to Pennsylvania are reflected in my own family history—from Quakers, to Scots-Irish and Germans, and later to Polish immigrants who settled in other parts of the Northeast. These are the ordinary laborers and farmers who built our nation.

52 Ancestors 2026: A Record that Adds Color – Tragic Endings

 

This story begins with the extensive Civil War pension file of Benjamin C. McWilliams. In the 1990s, I made a trip to the National Archives to examine his service and pension records for clues to his experiences during and after the Civil War. I was puzzled when the archivist brought out a large folder containing files for two soldiers—alongside Ben’s file was one for Hiram Carter. I was about to point out the apparent error when I realized the connection: both files were linked through Ben’s second wife, Mary Ann Case Carter McWilliams. Ben’s first wife, Mary Ann Cloud, had died in 1907, and he later married her first cousin, Mary Ann (Case) Carter, the widow of veteran and pensioner Hiram Carter.

More recently, my cousin Cindy sent me a large cache of image files containing the complete pension material for both Ben and Hiram. I have been cataloguing the 359 images and made detailed notes for the McWilliams file, intending to simply set aside the Carter materials for later study. While doing so, however, I came across a card that immediately caught my attention. It was a simple Form 3-1143, used to record family members who had served in the World War. Three names were listed:

Lyle R. Voorhees, deceased

Harry Carter, living

William Carter, living

The fact that one family member had served and died—and that Mrs. McWilliams had received compensation—piqued my interest. I suspected there was a deeper story behind this small document. There was.

Using FamilySearch, I identified all three men as grandsons of Mary Ann Carter McWilliams. I also found a death date for Lyle Voorhees: January 20, 1919. He had served with the 2nd Engineer Regiment, a unit that constructed fortifications and filled in as infantry when needed, earning him the rank of sergeant. Notes attached to his Find A Grave entry state that he died of lobar pneumonia at age twenty-two. This was a common complication of the influenza pandemic sweeping the world in 1919–1920 and serves as a stark reminder of the role disease has played during wartime.

But why did Mrs. McWilliams receive compensation? That answer lies in Lyle’s childhood. He was born on April 18, 1896, to James Voorhees and Mary Margaret Carter, daughter of Hiram and Mary Ann Carter. James and Mary had married in 1894, when Mary was just seventeen years old.

The young family’s happiness was short-lived. In 1899, a daughter, Ruby, was born, but she died on August 11 of that year. Within two months, both parents had also died—James on October 1 and Mary on October 10. The 1900 census shows young Lyle living with his grandparents, Hiram and Mary Ann Carter. A guardianship record from 1901 indicates that his aunt, Carrie Carter, assumed legal guardianship. Yet the 1910 census still places Lyle in the household of his grandmother and step-grandfather, Ben McWilliams.

Adding another layer of complexity, newspaper articles referenced on Find A Grave list Lyle’s next of kin as his uncle, Charles Carter, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and note that Lyle graduated from high school there. This raises many questions. Was Carrie’s guardianship largely legal rather than practical? What circumstances led Lyle to live with his uncle in Colorado and attend school there? And what caused the deaths of so many family members in such a short span of time?

In the era before vaccines and antibiotics, diseases such as diphtheria and typhoid claimed countless lives. Childbearing and the death of an infant placed additional physical and emotional strain on young mothers—Mary Margaret was only twenty-one when she died. We may never know all the answers to questions surrounding events that occurred more than a century ago, but family tragedies shaped by disease and war have been part of the human experience for as long as humans have existed.

All of this—uncovered from a single card buried deep within a pension file.

52 Ancestors 2025: A Musical Heirloom

 

This is a bonus post that combines the last two prompts—Family Heirloom and Musical—with perhaps a touch of the Wartime theme as well. It centers on a music book handed down from my great-grandmother, Nellie Louella McWilliams Fast, daughter of Ben McWilliams.

The book, Favorite Songs and Hymns, published in 1939, is a collection of old-time gospel hymns such as “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” and “The Old Rugged Cross,” along with songs deeply rooted in Midwestern and Southern traditions. The Fast family belonged to the Verdella Free-Will Baptist Church, and it’s easy to imagine these hymns sung by the congregation on a Sunday morning, following a long week of farm work.

The hymns, however, aren’t the only memorable part of the book. Written on the inside back cover are the names and addresses of several grandchildren who entered military service during World War II. One can easily imagine Grandma Fast writing letters to them, sharing news of life back on the farm.

Tucked inside the book is also a photograph of Grandma and Grandpa Fast with my twin uncles, John and Joe, taken in July 1941. I don’t know who took the picture, but it was made just a month after my mother had gone east to Buffalo, married my father, and begun their life together there.

So this heirloom isn’t a piece of fine china, antique jewelry, or handcrafted furniture—just a well-worn book and an old, cracked, discolored photograph. Yet together they hold a remarkable number of memories and offer a small but powerful snapshot of a moment in time.

52 Ancestors 2025: Family Heirloom — Real and Imaginary

 

Given the many moves my family has made over the generations, the number of children in each generation, and the fact that we were never awash in finery, I don’t have many heirlooms with clear and definite family ties. Maybe one or two come close. There is a plate decorated with old-fashioned “ABCs” that my mother said came to Missouri in a covered wagon. I’m not entirely sure whether that story originated in our family or in an antique shop, or whether there truly was a Reed ancestor who traveled west before the age of railroads. From what I’ve been able to determine from my family tree, the earliest Missouri pioneers were on my paternal side.

My father passed along a number of useful items. As a millwright, he accumulated a wide collection of tools, including a formidable ½-inch drill with a yoke and side handle that can power its way through just about anything. One item he gave me was an Eclipse shoe cobbler stand (see above), said to have belonged to my great-grandfather, likely Henry Yount. Like my other paternal great-grandfather, David Cassatt—who ran a home broom-making operation—I suppose Henry “Skinhorn” (and there must be a story behind that nickname) Yount may have worked on shoes.

But there is one heirloom I truly wish I had.

My second-great-grandfather, Ben McWilliams, described a cane he had made by a German woodcarver during the Civil War. In 1862, he worked for a sutler, John H. Gotshall of the 172nd Pennsylvania Regiment, near Yorktown, Virginia. He described the area this way:

There was a monument standing there marking the place where Cornwallis surrendered to Gen Washington. It had a fence made of red Cedar pickets run in around same.

The site had also seen fighting during the Peninsula Campaign.

After the battle of Yorktown the fence was badly destroyed; but upon looking around I found a thin detached 2x4 rail covered with grass that had escaped destruction. I found a knot in center which enabled me to break in in two, which gave me a pied enough to make four canes. I gave half of it away, found a German wood carver in the Regiment, and gave him the other half in payment for his services in carving me a cane. He carved me out a cane, with the Goddess of Liberty on the head on one side and the Eagle and a copperhead on the other side. He then carved a union soldier standing up, under them, standing upon a cannon ball, and a big snake wound around the cane, which represented the copperhead trying to bite him (2 feet long.) I took it home and gave it to my grandfather, who returned it to me just before his death. I still have it.

I asked both ChatGPT and Gemini to generate renderings of the cane based on this description. 

Gemini:

ChatGPT:

To me, the results seem more decorative than practical—but it’s hard not to imagine what that cane must have looked like, and what it would feel like to hold an heirloom so vividly tied to both family and national history.

52 Ancestors 2025: Written – Blasts from the Past

 

Finding something written by an ancestor is like uncovering buried treasure. Not only does it create a personal connection, but it also offers a unique window into history—a chance to see the past through the eyes of an ordinary person (unless, of course, your ancestor happened to be famous).

Some writings I've shared before, such as those of Rev. John Hale, a key figure in the Salem witch trials whose A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft remains a remarkable firsthand account. Another example is Jairus Abijah Bonney, who described his journey along the Oregon Trail.

A particularly rich source of ancestral writing comes from military pension records, especially from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. These statements—often dictated to county clerks—detail hardships, illnesses, battles, and the testimonies of neighbors and comrades. Christian Fast recorded his capture and escape from the Delaware Indians during the Revolution. Civil War pension files for David Cassatt, Anthony Gilmartin, and Benjamin McWilliams also provide vivid snapshots of their lives.

But the richest writings of all belong to my 2nd-great-grandfather, Ben McWilliams. He chronicled his enlistment in the Union Army, his capture and imprisonment, his release, and his life afterward. We’ve already met Ben through his descriptions of Andersonville prison, his emotional homecoming, and even his return to everyday chores like hog butchering and barn raising. His account of the unbroken prairie is especially striking—typical of what many settlers saw when they first arrived in new territory.

Ben wrote all of this by hand. I remember my Uncle Jim typing the memoirs so they could be shared, and more recently I used ChatGPT’s OCR tools to digitize the original pages. Reading through his story, several things stand out. He describes the “Raiders” from Confederate prison camps who targeted other prisoners, such as a fellow prisoner from the early days, John McElroy. Ben wondered what became of McElroy; it turns out he survived the war and made his mark in print. He later became a journalist and wrote extensively about those same camps.

Ben’s writings also reveal what a hustler he was. In prison, he figured out ways to get extra rations and outwit illiterate guards. After the war, he worked wherever he could—as a collier, mason, fisherman, laborer—and eventually settled into farming and family life. He mentions numerous relatives whose names we can now trace on FamilySearch. He also recounts conflicts with local rascals, which may explain some of the legal records I’ve uncovered.

There is so much to learn from the written traces our ancestors left behind. It makes me wonder what kind of written legacy we should be leaving for those who come after us.

52 Ancestors 2025: Fire – The Lost Records

 

Fire has long been an essential part of human existence—used for cooking, clearing brush for planting, warmth, and metallurgy, among other purposes. Yet building fires and wildfires can also destroy lives, property, and history. For this essay, I want to reflect on what we lost in the 1921 fire at the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C.

The purpose of the U.S. Census population schedules was to count everyone living in the United States in order to apportion seats in Congress. At first, only heads of households were named, and other members were simply tallied by age and gender. Beginning in 1850, however, curiosity about the nation’s people grew. Over time, the census began recording names and relationships within households, as well as information about education, literacy, birthplace, parents’ origins, citizenship, property, and more. Additional schedules on agriculture and industry were also collected, proving invaluable to historians and genealogists.

Although the census data were analyzed and compiled into statistical summaries, the original books were often viewed as expendable once their immediate purpose was served. Storage conditions were poor, and that neglect set the stage for a disaster familiar to every genealogist: the 1921 fire that destroyed nearly all of the 1890 census records. The damage came not only from the flames but also from the water used to extinguish them. Only a few fragments survived.

For a long time, I didn’t feel the loss too keenly, since I have so much information from the 1880 and 1900 censuses, and my ancestors remained in Barton County, Missouri, through much of the postbellum years. But as I’ve tried to go beyond names and dates in my research, the 1890 gap has become increasingly significant. That census would have captured a pivotal time for my great-grandparents’ generation.

The Cassatts were well established and seem to have had a home industry making brooms—were they growing broom corn? The Younts married after the 1880 census—what did their young family look like? Hannah Brown Reed was a widow—were there children still at home to help her? Several generations of Fasts were alive; in 1880, John Jay and Hannah’s granddaughter lived with them after her mother’s death in childbirth—did she return to her father, who remarried soon after the 1880 census? And what about Fannie Knauss McWilliams, also a widow—was she living alone or with one of her children?

Other records, such as the Civil War Veterans Schedule and pension files, help fill in some of the gaps, but the census has long been a backbone for understanding family structure, guiding us toward answers or new questions. As a side note, I’ve often wondered why the Agricultural Schedules stopped after 1880. It turns out the 1890 schedules were likely lost to the same fire and water damage, and the later ones were deliberately destroyed—deemed by Congress to have “no historical value.”

Historians today are working to go beyond compiled statistics and the stories of prominent men, to uncover the experiences of ordinary families like ours. Those destroyed records would have offered a wealth of detail—insight into daily life, work, and community—that we can now only partially reconstruct.

Photo: Courtesy Bureau of the Census: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census

52 Ancestors 2025: Disappeared—The Children

 

It is not uncommon in family research to find relatives who seem to have dropped out of the records under mysterious circumstances. Yet, what struck this genealogist (and father) with a professional interest in public health is the recurring pattern of infant and childhood mortality throughout my family history. The evidence is everywhere: large families in the 17th and 18th centuries, the reuse of names for children who died young, and mothers who themselves died in childbirth.

For this post, I chose to focus on the 1900 and 1910 censuses and the listings of my ancestors in Barton County, Missouri. Why these censuses? Because in these years, mothers were asked not only how many children they had, but also how many were still living.

The inclusion of these questions reflects a growing national interest in public health at the turn of the century. The United States was expanding, and cities were swelling with people. Coastal and river regions, particularly in warmer climates, were plagued by yellow fever and malaria. In Kentucky—a major pathway for many of my ancestors—the rise of Lexington as a trans-Appalachian “Athens of the West” was abruptly halted by a cholera epidemic in 1833. As cities grew, the problems of waste disposal and sanitation became impossible to ignore.

By the mid-1800s, public health reforms were gaining momentum. In Massachusetts, Lemuel Shattuck (my 5th cousin, five times removed) championed sanitation measures. In London, John Snow famously linked cholera to contaminated water at the Broad Street pump. Advances in germ theory by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and others, along with improvements in medical education, underscored the importance of separating water supplies from human and animal waste. Cities—especially overcrowded and impoverished neighborhoods like New York’s Lower East Side—saw the highest levels of childhood mortality, but rapid improvements followed.

What about rural Barton County, Missouri? Farms allowed for cleaner separation of wells, outhouses, and animal pens. Milk from cows on the farm was commonly boiled. Crowding was not an issue, but access to medical care was limited. Vaccines for childhood illnesses did not exist, nor were antibiotics available to treat bacterial infections.

Even so, mortality among children was a reality. Many of the older mothers among my ancestors lost between one and three children. We don’t always know how old the children were when they died, but we can imagine the grief. The mothers who had babies at the turn of the century and later may have seen some improvement, though I’d need to dig into statistics before drawing conclusions—that would be the subject of a scientific study, not a blog post.

The family photo at the top of this post, taken around 1909, shows my grandparents, Virgil and Marietta (Yount) Cassatt, with my Aunt Alta Mae. According to the 1900 census, Virgil's mother Susan lost 3 of her 6 children, and Marietta's Mary mother lost 2 of her 7 children. Together, Virgil and marietta had six children who survived infancy, but they also lost a 9-day-old baby boy, Frank, in 1907, and another newborn son in 1925. Their daughter Alta grew up, married, but died in 1942 at age 34 after a two-week illness. On my maternal side, a young uncle, Stephen Claire, died of appendicitis at age 6.

Today, we benefit from sanitation systems, vaccines, antibiotics, and hospitals equipped to care for the youngest and most vulnerable. Looking back, we can see how much progress has been made through public health, science, and medicine. Large families were the norm in those days, yet even with strong faith, supportive families, and close-knit communities, our ancestors deeply felt the pain of losing their children. Though some of these children may have lived only briefly, their memories endured.