A friend had to leave work early to tend her young grandson. The child’s day-care-facility was not operating because it was a holiday. A neighbor with no relatives in the area is looking for someone to watch her daughter while she goes to the hospital.

Today’s problems with locating child-care are not unique to our generation. Our ancestors also experienced them. Someone has always been needed to watch the children, and it was usually a relative or a neighbor. The best combination was a relative who was also a neighbor.

George Mead, a 34-year old farmer, appears on the 1880 Sumner County, Kansas census. Charles, his young son, is living with him. There is no wife and mother in the household. Who watched Charles while George was working on the farm? A neighbor? A relative?

There is a Minnie Haight in the next household on the census sheet. She is 32-years old. She was born in New York, as was George. Her father was born in New York, as was George’s. Her mother was born in Vermont, as was George’s. She is a likely candidate for not only being the neighbor who took care of Charles, but she is also a likely candidate for being a relative.

A couple of census pages away from George Mead and Minnie Haight, we find 26-year-old Orelia M. Hall. She was born in New York, her father was born in New York, and her mother was born in Vermont. Living in the household is 69-year-old Huldah Mead who was born in Vermont. Her relationship is given as “mother-in-law” to Orelia’s husband. We can infer that Orelia is Huldah’s daughter, and that possibly Huldah is mother to Minnie and George.

Census research is fairly easy to do. We have Internet access to HeritageQuest and Ancestry.com. Both have indexes and scanned census images. It’s tempting to copy the information for our direct ancestor and to move on to the next document. However, if we take the time to really look at the families who lived near our ancestors, we begin to see the lines that connect our ancestors to their relatives. We need to remember that families moved from one location to another with their kinfolks. Someone had to watch the children.

© 2006

Connie Lenzen, CG