I’m trying to find out more about the Hickman family. My Hickman relatives now live in Oklahoma, but before that they lived in Tennessee. I was looking at the 1870 federal census record for my gggreat grandpa Zachary Taylor Hickman and decided to take a spin around the census block to check out the neighbors.
His (at the time) future wife Mary Jane White is a tough one to pin down. So far it appears that after Zachary Taylor Hickman died she married at least two more times. Did she have a husband before Zachary Taylor? She was 20 when they married in 1873, so the odds are lower than if she’d been older.
So I’m cruising around District 9, Lawrence, Tennessee in 1870, trying to spot Mary Janes or a White family. I get to the end of the census District and see this:
Go ahead, blow that up on your computer screen and take a look at those stats. I hadn’t seen a tally like this before, and maybe it’s because of the census year or the region or just the guy they hired to do the job, or maybe I just haven’t reached the end of enough censuses (censi?). How about that voter count? It kind of makes me want to go back through the census and compare the number of adults eligible to vote and the number of actual adults in the area.
But that’s a distraction that’s going to derail me. I’ve been hot on Mary Jane White’s trail and I’m not ready to give up yet. It seems like the Hickmans reused names way more often than other family branches. This is making it really tough to figure out which Lemuel is which, and how the Lemuels connect with the Snowdens (I think they do somewhere along the line, maybe future back than Tennessee?).
Anywhoo, back to the census records. I just wanted to pop in here real quick to make a note of the nice statistical rundown.