Does this mean that there are pages missing?
This is a question about the census, not the community project, but this is the best category I know of for it.
The images for Massachusetts - Barnstable county - Enumeration district 40 (Woods Hole) go from sheet number 44 on image 45 to sheet number 71 on image 46. Were sheets supposed to be numbered consecutively within a district, or are such gaps normal?
I ask because as far as I know, Albert bought the Seven Winds in 1948, meaning that he and Márta should be in this ED, but I've been through the images backwards and forwards and haven't found them. (It doesn't help that I have been unable to decipher the enumerator's "addresses" sufficiently to identify Penzance Point, if it's even there. Would it have killed him to just use street names?)
(Yesterday, I could get at the images on both NARA's site and on FS. Today, I cannot find them anywhere on FS, which is very unfortunate, because NARA's viewer is horrible.)
Best Answer
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See the instructions here https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/1950instructions.pdf and specifically this paragraph.
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Answers
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No, that does not mean that there are pages missing. Sheet 71 and following were designated for return visits for those not at home on the enumerator's first visit. You will see on the first visit, usually, terms such as
Not at home. See Sheet 71 lines 12-16.
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Thanks, Áine! I was unsuccessful in tracking down the instructions, and even reading through the PDF that you linked, I missed the relevant paragraph.
Woods Hole -- being primarily a summer place back then -- is full of dwellings marked "vacant", along with a large number of "not at home" or "no one home" or whatever wording. It leaves me wondering what the difference was, or how the enumerator could tell. (He lived in Falmouth, so he was local, but it's not that small a place....)
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WRT street names - were they named yet? I have been scrolling through the rural area where some of my maternal family lived, and the roads were not yet named. I don't think they were even named in the 1960s. At least they had no street signs back then.
My usual go-to for instructions to enumerators is https://usa.ipums.org/usa/voliii/tEnumInstr.shtml
A friend noted in an area she was browsing that the enumerator made comments like "Vacant and not currently for rent." That enumerator apparently had good local knowledge.
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According to the deed of sale for the Seven Winds, Penzance Road was already called that in 1948. (The document doesn't mention the house's name, nor any house numbers, but it clearly mentions Penzance Road multiple times.)
I suspect that a place as reliant on visitors (tourists and scientists) as Woods Hole had a vested interest in having street names and street signs rather earlier than other places of its size.
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