In the course of transcribing the census we have all struggled with illegible names and occupations. The Ancestry/Familysearch transcriptions can offer some help, but we really shouldn't rely on them. Their transcription wasn't supported by information from another source, and, in fact, is no more than a best guess by a transcriber who probably was not a native English speaker and certainly not familiar with local names.
Sometimes we're focused on getting the sheets done and resist doing additional research. In this case we need to make sure that we add a note to alert reviewers that you suspect there is a problem.
Notes should be informative as possible-it saves a lot of time if the reviewer knows what you've done.
Less than adequate: Not sure about this
Adequate: Last name
illegible
Better: Last name
illegible, transcribed as
"Btsplx" but might be
"Bostwick"
When reading the transcription be suspicious of really unlikely names. Don't accept
"Tlagar" as a last name. Or if you do please add a note:
Adequate: Last name
"Tlagar" unlikely.
Better to err on the side of caution. The reviewers are pretty efficient and don't mind checking even if the transcription turns out to be right.
The same goes for occupations. Just as with names, the transcription is only a very rough guide. Early 20th century occupations might be unfamiliar to you; they were truly unfamiliar to the off-shore transcriber.
The
Ithaca City Directory offers a lot of help in confirming names and some help with occupations. It may seem like a huge time sink to track down names and occupations in the directory, but it's really just the opposite: a huge time-saver overall. And after a little practice you can become quite proficient.
The directories are available online as pdfs from Tompkins County Public Library. For 1909 and 1911 each directory is in five parts of approximately 90 pages each, which makes them awkward to use-you have to guess which part you want. They're also available as printed books in the History Center Library. This is a much more convenient format but you can't take it home.
The content of the City Directory is divided into four sections. The first part lists organizations and businesses and usually owners, principles etc. The second part is an alphabetic name index. It lists the heads of households and sometime others (wives, adult children, lodgers). The spellings of names in the directory
are almost always more reliable than the census. The name index begins in pt.1 and continues through pt. 4 in the 1909 and 1911 directories.
You can read the pdfs online or you can download them. If you download them and open them in the Adobe Reader they are searchable to some degree. Using the search function you don't have to scroll through as you do online but can search for a string of characters. To make this more useful I've merged the five parts of 1911 (1909 is coming) into a single pdf. It's too large to e-mail but I can pass it to you on a flash drive or share access to my Google Drive.
What can you do with it? Since these are string searches you can look for any string-first names, partial names, occupations, addresses. Here's just one example:
This was very tough. I've forgotten the transcription. Something like "Edanie Perby." I felt I could see "Carrie" as the first name, though. And she lived at 112 Prospect. (Not easy in itself, but discoverable through some other people living there.) So I tried "112 Prospect" in the directory. Nothing in 1911, but this came up in 1909:
Could this be Carrie? It was. She shows up in the 1900 Census as Carrie Rowley.
Of course you don't have to go this far, but a quick look in the directory using the string search can be very helpful.
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If you have a page that's difficult to read it's good to have the section of the directory that is organized by street and house number for the street you're working on as a reference. There is rarely a one-to-one match between the census and the directory, but often what correspondence there is can really help you. Even when the names seem legible, they may quite different than they appear at first glance.
