Indexing Errors on Census Records

Once again, caution for the researcher used to quickly finding names on census indeces, such as Ancestry.com- these indexes are NOT infallable! In checking for a family that resided in the same Wisconsin county for nearly sixty years, I was baffled by them NOT turning up in the 1930 census in the same locale. So today, I decided that perhaps a page by page manual search, like I used to do, was in order, to satify my feeling that they hadn't moved or that their surname was misspelled or whatever might have happened, hadn't happened absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt; so I could, in all good conscience, begin to search for where they might have migrated to.

Guess what? There they are- name spelled the same way it has been for sixty years, in the same small town that they have been all along, still married, still in the same occupation. I then rechecked the index, using the exact information from the census entry, and they don't come up at all. Error and wasted time- but I was not deterred nor should you be. If you believe a family would still be in the same locale in a census, check page by page yourself to be certain that no errors have occurred.