Missing Indices in 1895 New Jersey (United States) State Census
Source indices are missing for some localities of Cumberland County, New Jersey, for the 1895 New Jersey State Census. These localities align exactly with a specific film number (888654).
From this page:
Scroll down to Cumberland County, New Jersey. You'll see that the Cumberland Co. localities are covered under two film numbers. All localities for film #888653 are represented in searchable indices, and all localities for film #888654 are not found in any source search. In fact, this is alluded to by the absence of a magnifying glass icon for that film number.
I might be misremembering, but I'll almost swear that these localities were at one point indexed.
I see that there are a number of other film rolls within this catalog item which are also not represented as having searchable indices. I'm not sure if this is because they were never indexed, or if they were and somewhere along the line there was data loss, or what-have-you, but it's clear that the issue is broader than the one roll I'm focused on.
Ultimately, I'm looking for a resolution path to attachable source indexing for the currently-unindexed rolls, but I'm unsure how to pursue resolution when I don't know if this is an incomplete index effort or a data defect after the fact where the indices were lost/offline. I'm aware that I can manually go hunt through thousands and thousands of names for every person I'm looking for, but that really kinda defeats the purpose of having indexed sources, and I then can't individually attach the source items to each person referenced.
Answers
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Since we have recently encountered issues with the existing indexes for the US 1900 and 1940 as well as the 1871 England censuses, it wouldn't surprise me to find the same in other records.
As a workaround - until such time as the 1895 is corrected/fixed - Ancestry also has the index for the 1895 New Jersey. I know part of Newark, in Essex County, is missing from the Ancestry index, but I don't know of any issues with Cumberland County. You could use the Ancestry index to pinpoint which film/image contains your person of interest and then manually browse to that location on FamilySearch to attach the source. Or you can attach the source from Ancestry.
Hope this helps.
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I thank you for your suggestions, but I'm not interested in employing those methods as workarounds. I'm working on 300 years of an entire New Jersey county (not kidding), and those workarounds are prohibitive at scale.
Again, I do thank you for taking the time to suggest them; they're just not going to work at the scale I need. :)
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That is an interesting effect. When you click through the Note mentioning the records are available online...then choose the 'How to Use this Collection' button. There is a chart of the counties included in the whole database. Interesting that the chart indicates that Cumberland county has no records included in the database. However, I found one Jenrie Partin (by clicking through the magnifying glass) and tested to see if she also showed up in the full collection, which she does.
I tried the same search using a name directly from an image on the second film 888654 which is indicated as not indexed and that name did NOT show up in the full collection. It appears that only part of the county was indexed, as you say, which is very strange.
As mentioned above, Ancestry.com does appear to have fully indexed this entire census. And it is possible that the solution to this mystery comes from The Genealogical Society of New Jersey's blog post on the New Jersey Censuses. The clue is the date 2017. That was right about the period that FamilySearch started really shaking hands with the other big genealogy sites, going for coordination of efforts instead of each site producing duplicate indexes. I'd propose that FamilySearch stopped indexing the 1895 New Jersey census because Ancestry was already on it. No need to duplicate effort. No proof of this, it is just the dates involved that fit with that time period.
So, what does that do for you and your research project? I'd suggest searching on Ancestry for at least that census year. Ancestry doesn't have an export results as FamilySearch does, but you can copy the page and paste it into an worksheet and it comes out pretty well, if that is what you are doing with your research.
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