Two Ravens Genealogy Blog

     Welcome back to the 52 in 52 series! This week I decided to look more closely at an ancestor that appeared in last week's post on the Thomas and Roxcellana (Smith) Johnson family, their second oldest daughter, Lucena Serezia. Lucena intrigued me deeply because of her apparent odd move from the family home in Vermont to New Jersey and then further to Mobile, Alabama. What prompted her to deviate from the family westward migration to Wisconsin and why did she go to Mobile? Where was she during the Civil War, and where did she eventually go? Furthermore, I had heard a rumor that her son, Edwin W. Finch, had become a renowned Shakespearean actor of the late 19th century; was it true?      Lucena Serizia Johnson was born 3 Feb 1811, the second daughter of Thomas Johnson and his wife Roxcellana (Smith) Johnson, in Vernon, Windham County, Vermont. On her birth record, it indicates that her mother may have been living somewhere else in Vermont at the time of h...

     Note: All examples in this post were randomly selected from Ancestry. These are not client or personal records.     Welcome to the first of my guides to working with the various non-population schedules contained in the US Federal Census records. Today's guide will cover the Federal Mortality Schedules. I hope to give you a general overview of the schedule itself, and how to read and interpret the information that you find in those schedules.      Beginning in 1850 and ending in 1885, the Federal government began appending lists of deaths to the US Federal Census. Since every census divided areas up by county and precinct, the census takers were able to ask individual residents about deaths in the family. If someone was single, or for other reasons not living in a family unit, they may have been missed by the census taker, so if your ancestor doesn't show up where you think they should be, that may be the cause.      Note: In a...

      In my last post, I mentioned using the US Federal Mortality Schedules to gather more information on an ancestor's husband. Today I'd like to introduce the Non-Population Schedules in general, and then over the next week or so go into detail about these additions to the US Census that will provide a ton of information for your own research.      Between 1810-1880, and once again in 1935, as part of the US Federal Census, the government decided to collect more information on different portions of the population, and gathered them into what are called Non-Population Schedules . These provided data on industry, including farming and ranching, certain social groups, and deaths. These were only applicable in certain states, and certain circumstances, so be aware that the schedule might not have been taken in the area of your research. The National Archive has helpfully provided a place to check what schedules were done on a state-by-state basis at  htt...

Welcome to the second post in the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks series! For this week I chose the Thomas and Roxcellana (Smith) Johnson family, which is a perfect study in pre-Civil War westward movement. Unlike the romantic pioneer image of the family packing up a Conestoga wagon, and leaving everything behind, the Johnson family experienced a far more typical progression westward, that of a slow progression in small family groups.           The Johnson family largely lived in Vernon, a town in Windham County, Vermont.  The history of Vernon is a complex one, with pieces of the town being acquired through land grants from Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In fact, the name of the town, Vernon, wasn't formally established until 1802; before 1802, the town was called Hinsdale, located directly across the Connecticut River from Hinsdale, NH. Early on, the town itself was the site of Fort Bridgeman, very much located in Native American territory, and the site o...

 Posts are going on hiatus for a bit. I have covid and I'm going to take a wee break to recover. See you on the flip side!