I can find an 1850 census record in Ancestry, but not in FS.

jeffhampton1

In the 1850 census for Subdivision 15, Knox County, Tennessee, I see an entry for Jonathan Salant (actual surname Tallent), along with Amanda Salant, and Moses Walker. They are on Page 209 of 267 pages; Dwelling number 1754, Family number 1763. I'm curious why I can't find this census record in FamilySearch?

Is there a chance that this record can be indexed in FS, so that I may attach it to my ancestors?

Thank you,

Jeff Hampton

Paul W

@jeffhampton1

It already appears on the website! See https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MCD2-NR3

Incidentally, I "cheated" by finding it (firstly) through a search for Moses Walker, in Tennessee - searching from within the 1850 US census collection itself, rather than undertaking a general search of the whole database. Initially, I inputted "Knox County" in the Place field, but that produced no results.

I just had another try: for some reason, neither "Knox" nor "Knox County" inputs produce a result, but inputting Knox with a wildcard (i.e. "Knox*") works - as with the "Tennessee" input.

Actually, I believe I do know why a "Knox" input doesn't work - in the same way I have to input "Sunderland*" instead of just "Sunderland", when I search for my relatives who lived in that place in England. If there are multiple places with the same placename on the database, it was explained to me (some years ago) that the search ignores the "Knox" (or "Sunderland") places that appear "lower down the list", as it only searches on the places (of those names) at the top of the database list! Confused? Yes, I still can't work it out, either! But the "moral of the story" seems to be to always add a wildcard to the town name if you don't search on state (USA) or county (UK).

Julia Szent-Györgyi

If none of Paul's tricks with searches are yielding the right person, but you have the record in Ancestry, you can use the header and household info from the page to browse through the images on FS and find the record that way. This can be especially useful for unusual surnames that get misheard by enumerators or completely misread by indexers (or both).

Go to Search - Records, scroll down, then use the Find A Collection box to find the collection ("United States Census, 1850") and go to the collection's Search page (https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/1401638). In the yellow section, click the "Browse All NNN Images" button, then choose the state, then the county, then the enumeration district or other lowest heirarchy. (You'll likely need to consult the image on Ancestry to figure out that last.)

Once you're browsing through images, use the numbers on the page -- such as household number in the 1850 census, or sheet number in later ones -- to browse to the right image. (See below for more detail.) In this case, it's image 301 of 359 in the "Tennessee - Knox - Knox county, part of" section of the 1850 U.S. census.

Once you've found the image, open the Image Index tab at the bottom and scroll through to see how your person or family was indexed. (The entries on that tab are generally in the order that they were indexed, which is generally the order that they appear on the page -- but unfortunately not always.) In this case, you can see that FS's indexers read the surname as "Salard". Click the piece-of-paper icon to the left of the name to go to the index detail page (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MCD2-NR3), where you can use the Attach To Family Tree button at the top of the right-hand column to attach the source citation.

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More detail about finding household 1754 in "Knox county, part of": when you click the final waypoint, you're looking at image 1 of however many images are in the group, in this case 359. Type a number about halfway through into the "Image __ of" box and hit Enter on your keyboard to see how far that gets you. For example, I put in 150, and saw household numbers in the 600s, so I knew I needed to keep going. I tried 300 and saw 1742 to 1748, which is very close, so I just clicked the > button to go to 301, and voilá, there it was, toward the bottom of the page.

jeffhampton1

thank you so much for the info!