I have been taking a closer look at the 1810 U.S. Census for Isham Thrift (Sr.) in North Carolina and can't quite make the numbers match up with what I thought I knew about that family. Unfortunately the 1810 census doesn't name names of family members. But according to the census image we had Isham Thrift as head of family, with the following others in the household:
1 Free white male under 10
2 FWMs 10 - 15
0 FWMs 16 - 25
0 FWMs 26 - 44
1 FWM 45 and over
4 Free white females under 10
1 FWF 10 - 15
0 FWFs 16 - 25
1 FWF 26 - 44
1 FWF 45 and over
1 Slave
This adds up to 11 family members living at home.

Okay. now, who should have been at home?

Five children got married before 1810, and I assume they are gone:
Elizabeth (30, b. 1780, m. 1802)
Susannah (29, b. 1781, m. 1803)
Perry (27, b. 1783, m. 1806)
Sarah (23, b. 1787, m. 1807)
Delilah (20, b. 1780, m. 1809)

So we should be left with:
Isham (52)
Mary (50)
Peggy (19)
Isham Jr. (17)
David (16)
Drury (15)
William (13)
Mary (11)
Frances (9)
Nancy (9)
Levicy (5)
This also adds up to 11 family members at home. So at least we agree on that.

Now when I match up the ages of the remaining children with age brackets in the census form, I get mismatches:
0 FWM under 10 [mismatch]
2 FWMs 10 - 15 (Drury, William) [match]
2 FWMs 16 - 25 (Isham, David) [mismatch]
0 FWMs 26 - 44 [match]
1 FWM over 45 (Isham, Sr.) [match]
3 FWFs under 10 (Frances, Nancy, Levicy) [mismatch]
1 FWF 10 - 15 (Mary) [match]
1 FWF 16 - 25 (Peggy) [mismatch[
0 FWFs 26 - 44 [mismatch]
1 FWF over 45 (Mary, Sr.) [match]

I will be checking other censuses to see if the age mismatches persist over the longer term, but right now I don't know who has it wrong.

Comments anyone?

Hi Bob
Re "I have been taking a closer look at the 1810 U.S. Census for Isham Thrift (Sr.) in North Carolina and can't quite make the numbers match up with what I thought I knew about that family."

I don't have a lot of experience with censuses, so I'd like to know if others agree with my impressions.

My impression is that early censuses were notoriously inaccurate as far as ages, and also as far as numbers of people. (Note these are two different types of errors.) You must have seen that different censuses will report different birth years for the same person. The main reason seems to be that there was no consequence on the census-taker if the info was incorrect. The census takers seem to have often gotten their info from people in the families (teens who were at home when the census-taker stopped by?) who didn't know the answers and just guessed. I wonder also if knowing everyone's exact age and birthdate might have been less important when people were mostly illiterate, and calendars and watches weren't ubiquitous. (For any literate ones, almanacs may have been more important than calendars, to figure out when to plant & do other farm tasks.)

The number of people in the households also seems to often vary from expectations, due to live-in (free, not slave) male & female helpers, as well as live-in cousins, nephews & nieces, etc. If the report doesn't match expectations it doesn't necessarily mean that either our expectations or the report is in error.

You have subtracted out the children of Isham who were married by 1810; do their census entries all exist for 1810, and do they match expectations?

You expect to find 5 males while only 4 were reported. "The 1810 census was begun on 6 August 1810. The count was due within nine months, but the due date was extended by law to ten months." If ages were supposed to reflect age as of August 6, David Thrift (b. November 17, 1794) would have been 15, not 16, so there is expected to be THREE 10 y.o. males, not two. And Isham Jr could possibly have been out of the house by mid-1811.

Mary, about 11, could have been reported as under 10. Peggy was ~19, smack in the middle of the 16-25 range. How could she have been reported as under 16? Is that much error unheard of? I suspect not.

A live-in helper (or relative?) could possibly account for the 26-44 y.o. female.

Just my speculations, based on limited experience. But even if census reports weren't reliable, it IS good to try to match them up with what we think we know about the family, as you are doing. Something important and new WILL turn up sometime.

Richard

Thanks Richard, your comments are very good ones. I am going to follow this up a bit further, to see whether the 5 children that I say should be missing from home, actually do turn up elsewhere in the 1810 census, and also to see whether any of the ages get themselves straightened out in subsequent censuses.

One of my reasons for doing this was to find out whether I could make things match up, because it would indicate that David (16) was still at home in 1810, thus lending some weight to the argument that this was NOT the David who m. Sally (Sarah) Thrift (his sister) because he was still at home after Sarah was gone. That, and the fact that David would have been only 13 when Sarah got married in 1807.

This is probably beating an old puzzle into the ground, but there are still some out there who are unconvinced.

Best regards,
Bob

Robert Lyle Thrift
Masonville, CO

Excellent idea to try and establish that Isham's son David was still home in 1810 after Sara /Sally Thrift married her husband, also named David Thrift. (Good to know I'm not the only one here trying to beat old puzzles into the ground.)

I have to say, I think it's silly just on the face of it to assume that this brother & sister from a wealthy family couldn't find better mates, and so married each other. I also think it's pretty silly to suggest that at age 13, David married his 20-year-old sister.

Mike Thrift did offer a conceivable way out of the brother/sister portion of the problem (but not the age problem).
http://www.vagenweb.org/shenandoah/thriftmichaelms.html
Mike suggested (based on no evidence, apparently) that Sarah could be the daughter of "Isham Sr's brother William" i.e she could be the daughter of William the son of Nathaniel Thrift, and Isham, her uncle?, became her guardian or godfather (William died 1790, Sarah was born ~1787). However this is unlikely if -as I have argued- Isham was not Nathaniel's son and was not related to William. And it still doesn't address why a 13-year old boy would marry, even if the bride was not his sister. Mike agrees there is a problem with this, but in his ms he seems to assume that the censuses of 1830 and 1850, which he says show David to be born ~1795, are both in error and that Isham's son was actually born several years earlier. Bob, where did you get the birth date of Nov 17, 1794 for Isham's son David? (Darlene said she got the date from you) Is this reliable? Is it in the 1860 census? If three or more censuses say the same year of birth, it seems hard to argue with.

One might argue a bit more convincingly that David who married Sally was not Isham's son but was William's -except that currently we have no evidence that William had any sons. (None are mentioned in the abstract of his will, for instance.)

Instead I suspect Isham had relatives in Dinwiddie Co VA, unknown to us now, and David who married Sally may have been one of those.

Mike Thrift and his close relatives descend from this David & Sally Thrift. DNA testing might -with luck- show whether there is a difference between this David and the known sons of Isham. Descendants of David & Sally are shown here
http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=DESC&...
...and I suspect we may be able to find some male descendants of Isham for comparison :)

Richard Thrift

"I have to say, I think it's silly just on the face of it to assume that this brother & sister from a wealthy family couldn't find better mates, and so married each other. I also think it's pretty silly to suggest that at age 13, David married his 20-year-old sister."

I think it's even more silly to think that a 20-year-old young woman would even consider marrying her obnoxious 13-year-old kid brother. Believe me, I have raised teenagers, and I know whereof I speak.

"Bob, where did you get the birth date of Nov 17, 1794 for Isham's son David? (Darlene said she got the date from you) Is this reliable? Is it in the 1860 census? If three or more censuses say the same year of birth, it seems hard to argue with."

I can't say now where I got such a precise date. It wouldn't hurt to revisit this. The 1850 census has him at age 55 (thus, b. abt. 1795), and the 1860 census has him at age 65 (again, b. abt. 1795). IGI also says 1795.

"I suspect Isham had relatives in Dinwiddie Co VA, unknown to us now, and David who married Sally may have been one of those."

I like that hypothesis as well as any, given my present state of ignorance. :-)

"Mike Thrift and his close relatives descend from this David & Sally Thrift. DNA testing might -with luck- show whether there is a difference between this David and the known sons of Isham. Descendants of David & Sally are shown here
http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=DESC&;...
...and I suspect we may be able to find some male descendants of Isham for comparison :)"

Well, I am one of those descendants of Isham, and I will no doubt get the DNA testing sometime during the year, but given the current state of the economy and its effect on my household budget, I will probably wait for the income tax refund to come through before going ahead.

Best regards,
Bob

Robert Lyle Thrift
Masonville, CO

I meant to mention in my last post,and failed to, that there has been a certain amount of discussion of a "David Alva Thrift" as a possible candidate for the husband of Sarah/Sally Thrift.

I can find no evidence that such a person ever existed.

The name Alva is not that rare by itself, but I have searched every online genealogy search provider that I have access to, and have searched the wide open internet for David Alva Thrift as well, with no results.

I did find a handful of genealogy discussion forums that mentioned this name, but no facts. Incidentally, as near as I can determine this name first appeared,unsubstantiated, in a GenForum message list around 1999. Since then, a few people with on-line genealogies have adopted him.

I won't say this person is a myth -- not everything is available online, far from it -- but the fact is that there are no real facts about him on line, that I can find.

Best regards,
Bob

Robert Lyle Thrift
Masonville, CO

Which David is this? The husband of Sally? How do the Parish & Smith families fit in?

http://files.usgwarchives.net/nc/granville/marriages/marrbon...
MARRIAGE BONDS FOR GRANVILLE COUNTY
BOND # NAME OF BRIDE AND GROOM DATE BONDSMAN
#4961--CATHERINE Parish TO STERLING Smith 1-1-1817 |DAVID THRIFT

Richard THRIFT

I don't know who that David is; he may be Sarah/Sally Thrift's David, but according to the birth dates and locations of their children, that pair should be living in Orange County in 1817.

Of course, Orange and Granville did share a common boundary (they don't now), so, depending on where they lived, maybe David only had to walk across the road to get to Granville.

The function of the marriage bondsman is a little unclear to me; don't they have to put up some money? Isham's son David would have been only 23, and probably not too flush financially at that time in his life. I know I wasn't. :-)