This week Nancy Johnson Crow suggested that we investigate our ancestors in the non-population schedules of the U.S. federal census as our theme for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. I have to admit that it is getting harder and harder to find ancestors who meet the theme. I have done most of my male ancestors for four generations, and my goal is to do a different person each week. This week’s entry put me at 86 mini-bios since I started this blog in January 2014.
I have only found a couple of ancestors in the special schedules. Just a few of my German immigrants were farmers, at least here in the United States. Most practiced one of the trades; they were coopers and blacksmiths and carpenters. Yest none were large enough to be enumerated in the manufacturing schedules either.
I knew I was going to have to dig deep this week. Ancestry.com does not have non-population schedules for Pennsylvania online, which was another complication. Eventually, I found the Pennsylvania schedules for 1850 and 1880 online at the website of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. They are not indexed, so it helped me to revisit the original censuses to confirm which township I needed before browsing through the images.
I decided that I would look for two of my third great-grandfather’s brothers, Adam and Thomas Whipple (Wippel). I had written about their father, my fourth great-grandfather, in week 25 – “Christopher Whipple (Wippel) – Had a Farm.” I knew that the farm had been taken over by the youngest son, Adam, before Christoff’s will was written. I wondered, what could I find out about the Whipple farm from the special schedules; also, what could I learn about Thomas Whipple’s farm?
I did locate three census schedules that were applicable to the Whipple family – one for Christoff in 1850 and one each for Adam and Thomas in 1880. I am not going to go into the minutia of what was grown in what quantities. I will reproduce the schedules here and hope that they are readable. I learned that Christoff’s farm was moderately prosperous; his farm was fairly average compared to his neighbors’ in most ways. I had a few minor surprises. One was that he was one of the few local farmers who had no land that wasn’t in cultivation. He also had one of the higher values on his farm equipment. I don’t know if there was a relationship between these two facts. Did have more or better farm equipment allow Christoff to farm more of his land, or did he owe money on the equipment and need to farm every square inch of his property?
When it came time to look at the 1880 agricultural schedule, I decided to fill in a blank census form the two brothers. Even though the forms are intended to be completed separately for each township, I combined them on one. This allowed me analyze side-by-side how the two farms were performing. It appears that Thomas was able to produce more than his younger brother and he cited the value of his farm as being significantly higher than that of his brother. Thomas gave the value of his farm as $6000 compared with just $1295 for Adam’s farm. That is a significant difference for two farms that in other ways appear to be fairly comparable on paper. I realize that there are a lot of variables that go into farming, but it is rather a surprise that Thomas’ 30 chickens could lay 870 dozen eggs, while Adam’s 50 chickens could only lay 200 dozen eggs.
One other interesting find is that the numbers for the Pennsylvania agricultural schedules have been sampled and some statistical data has been mapped as a result. These maps are available on the website of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. This one demonstrates that both Thomas and Adam owned more than the average number of cows.
Was Thomas really a bigger success at farming than Adam? I don’t know. The census is, after all, self-reporting. But it is interesting to contemplate the background behind the numbers.