Orphan Census Forms
Last night (27 Dec 2008) Morgan Chai, the lead researcher, amazed me again with the way her mind works when she showed me how she found census forms for Orphanages. Just because I was so overwhelmed at her incredible tenacity I felt that she needed to share this with everyone who's interested in doing the research themselves. I hope you read her story first then go to the census pages because if you're here you have, more than likely, had someone in your family who rode the Orphan Trains. Neither myself nor Morgan has any Orphan Train Riders in our heritage, so you have to first understand why Morgan is doing this. Please drop down to "Morgan's Story."
Click HERE to go directly to the list of Orphanages that Morgan is finding:
Morgan's story:
Thanks for reading this as I hope it helps you to uncover your own past. But first, the reason I do what I'm doing is because there is nothing I care more about than the plight that faces the world's children. It's deplorable how children are bartered, sold for sex slaves, are the major commodity in human trafficking, and it just goes on and on, and it is happening to over one million children per year. The numbers are increasing regardless of what governments say they are doing to stop the problem.
I have a web site called "2500 Children A Day" that discusses this problem in detail, meaning that in the US alone, 2,500 Children a Day go missing. Shocking isn't it. The site has hundreds of links worldwide to information to back up my statistics (to Dept of State, the FBI, etc, etc,) and it had links other sites, worldwide, that are trying to help children. Obviously, child abusers and traffickers (worldwide) want my site off the net and after six years of struggle, they nearly won. I am a retired Senior Intelligence Agent, so I know what I'm doing. I know what I've experienced, and I know that it needs to be exposed. To read more about me and why I am determined to expose the dangers that children face, I invite you to go to Further Beyond, which is a site that has been created to help me sell my books, two of which are dedicated to the plight that the world's children face, "Retrieved and Stolen Lives".
Now then, let's move on to how to help you do the research to find your "Lost Heritage", or to understand how I do it and why it takes so long.
I am subscribed to Ancestor.com which is where I do the bulk of my research. I have been a member since Aug 2008 and don't have any complaints. It's a great site, and costs $29.95 per month, and if memory serves, I think they have a cheaper service if you don't need access to foreign census records, etc.
To begin with, I log into Ancestor.com which takes about 5 minutes for the home page to fully load. They aren't slow, it's my Internet connection. Once logged in, I begin my research. Last night as I was trying to find more information about Orphan Train Riders I was reminded of how difficult it is in census forms to track someone in a facility, just like you can't track someone at an address. You can only use names, states, counties, cities, state where born, birth dates, and on some years you can use parents' names and birthplaces. And one thing that I seldom use is the Relationship selection when searching, but even that isn't available in every census year.
Last night I had found one website where someone typed up a list of members in a certain orphanage for 1880. I was so impressed, but wondered why she didn't do more. Then I wondered how she found that Orphanage. I went to the 1880 census but its selections for research are too limited, so I went to a 1900 census. Since most children came out of New York, I first searched New York for "Ward" in the relationship and left all other fields blank, except of course the state which was "New York". When my selections opened, I was shocked. Hundreds upon hundreds of children in all NY counties were placed with families as foster children (as we would call it now). I realized that was too much data to sort through.
Then I tried searching for students, but too many educational institutions had live-in students who were not orphans. But I accidently stumbled on one orphanage in the process, "The Children's Fold, in Manhattan, NY." It was a small orphanage of only one and a half pages, or about 70 children. (50 names per census page) I saved those two census pages to put on this website and they are cited below. One thing that was very misleading was that the transcribers showed that everyone in that orphanage was black, but once on the census pages, that was wrong. They were mostly born in NY but their families were from Ireland, England, Prussia, Norway, you name it. They were children of recent immigrants, and no blacks were listed.
What's even more important is that the children weren't cited as "students", but as "pupils" and not "wards", and the person in charge was a matron. Superintendents were usually associated with schools. And I can tell by the age of the children that it's either a school or orphanage (in case the name of the place isn't put on the census form). Students are usually much older, and orphans are younger, from one month old to about 10 or 12 years old.
Then I searched for "pupils" and "matrons" and after paging through several hundred selections, I found another orphanage: "The Orphan Asylum Society of the City of Brooklyn, NY." I was just going to copy the names of the kids and be done with it (to put on this site) but I kept finding one census page after another, so what initially appeared to be 90 orphans ended up to be about 400, or 8 pages of names. Again, why the transcribers did that is beyond me. Anyway, I continued to page through more names and found the "Western NY Society for the Protection for Homeless and Dependent Children" in East Randolph Village, Cattaraugus, NY, which ended up as 4 pages, or about 200 children.
What you need to remember is that orphans came from many eastern cities and states, and what I found were only three orphanages in NY alone. In two hours I found about 670 children out of God only knows how many. It was quite in the wee hours of the morning, and I was suddenly burned out when I realized that this was going to be a mentally, emotionally and physically daunting task in the coming year. That's also when my hope of transcribing names for this website was going to have to be simply left to making those census forms available to you.
However, after a good night's sleep I woke with an idea where I will take one name from each census page and search for that child. When the data page opens (before you can click to go to a form) it should give me a list of about 60 kids. I will copy that list and save it to my word processing program. I will continue doing that per page, per orphanage. Then I will use the "sort" command in my word processor, and after it sorts, I should be able to delete the duplicates, then put a list of names on this site, per orphanage, per census year. Mind you, they will be alphabetical according to first name, not last, but I am sure it will be easier for you to find someone that way than having to use a census page, which is extremely tiring.
But, I want you all to keep something in mind, and it is a very important something. I can only do this on census data obtained every 10 years, i.e., 1850, 1860, and so on. And if there were 250,000 children who rode the Orphan Trains from 1850 to 1930 that means there were an average of 3,125 children who rode them yearly. But for our decennial census limitations (occurring every ten years), that means 31,250 children rode them each decade. And the children didn't stay in orphanages for 10 year periods, so all this research will only give us listings of maybe a couple thousand per decade instead of the 31,250 that we need to find yearly.
For now, where does that leave me? I will have the census pages on this website as I get them, providing they all downloaded ok. I mentioned in another article that at times you cannot copy certain forms because you get parsing failures, meaning they can't open. Cross your fingers.
1920 Census sample This is a sample graphic of what you will be looking at using the below census forms for the orphanages. Each decade the forms change a bit, but it will give you an idea at what information you can obtain from a census form.
Be advised, each page will take about 30 seconds to open. I have removed all coding to allow you to easily print or copy each page. Simply RIGHT click on the image and select Print or Save (to your hard drive).
1900 CENSUS PAGES
— The Children's Fold, Manhattan, NY (2 pages)
— Western NY Society for the Protection for Homeless and Dependent Children, Randolph, NY (4 pages. Page 7 missing due to parsing failure, but will be fixed soon)
— The Orphan Asylum Society of the City of Brooklyn, NY (8 pages)
more to be added
