Searching Ancestry.com or: How I Learned to Stop Spelling Correctly and Love the Census

When Linda Bussey handed me the names of two former Hower House servants, I couldn't wait to go find them online. Aside from Valinda Hurley, the famous local cook who had worked for Blanche Hower, I didn't know the names of anyone who had worked at the house, and everything the museum staff could tell me about the servants was based on speculation rather than documentation. So when Linda asked if I wanted the names of two sisters who had worked as maids at the house, I could hardly believe it: of course I wanted them! I walked away with Hanne Ruthenberg and Tille Carre written on a pink sheet of paper.  I felt like my research was finally getting started, and it was exciting.

  

However, I didn't know where to start looking for Hanna and Tille. Of course I tried googling first, but that didn't turn up anything useful. Linda had suggested that I look through census records to find Hower employees, but I didn't see how a census record could be useful when I already had the sisters' names. (At the time, I didn't know that census records contained so much other information, and I didn't know how to search them anyway.)  

I thought of all the information Mark Price of the Akron Beacon Journal had been able to find on Valinda Hurley when he wrote about her. (You can read his article here.) I hadn't appreciated how detailed his research was until I could find nothing on Hanna and Tille. Mark had cited a lot of now-defunct newspapers in his article, so I decided to look through some old papers myself.  

The Akron-Summit County Public Library provides access to NewspaperARCHIVE, a database that includes over 100 Ohio papers from 1800-present. (You can search it here.) I thought a good place to start would be finding for myself some of the clippings that Mark quotes in his article and move outward from there. However, I couldn’t find any of them, not even the newspapers, let alone the specific articles. 

I figured that, as a journalist, Mark Price must have access to some obscure newspaper files that a regular person wouldn’t be able to find, perhaps in a secret room in the basement of the Akron Beacon Journal building. So I wrote to him and asked where he got his information, hoping he’d give me some tips or maybe even invite me to check out the secret room. Mark kindly answered me and said he'd done most of his research via census records, city directories, and Newspapers.com. He admitted that searching for Valinda had been difficult because she was known by so many variations of her name during her lifetime, and he'd had to search for them all. "There was just enough information for a story," he wrote. "I wish I could have found more." 

I was disappointed there wasn't a secret basement room at the ABJ, but at least I could sign up for Newspapers.com and get access to the same resources the professionals use. (Thank goodness for Mark's article, or I wouldn’t have realized there were local papers not included in NewspaperARCHIVE, including old issues of the Akron Beacon Journal that have turned out to be crucial for my research.)

Meanwhile, Linda Bussey emailed me the name of another woman who'd worked for the Howers, and this time she had pictures: Augusta Strickroth worked as a maid for John H. Hower in 1912 at the Buchtel Avenue house, which is the smaller place John took after transferring the Hower House to Otis and Blanche in 1901. Augusta thus wasn't actually a Hower House servant, Linda explained, but she thought I'd want to include her nevertheless.  I agreed and added Augusta's name to my list of people to find.

Photo courtesy of the Hower House Museum

Mark Price had said he'd searched census records to get information on Valinda Hurley, so I thought those records might help me as well.  In any case, I couldn't find proof that Hanna Ruthenberg and Tille Carre had even existed, so finding them in census records would be a start. I began by googling “how to search census records” and quickly discovered that it’s difficult to access census information for free: while the records themselves are publicly available, you have to pay for the convenience of being able to search digitized copies (or belong to a library that pays for that service). Ancestry.com offers a package subscription to both Ancestry and Newspapers.com, so I sucked it up and entered my credit card info. And then the floodgates of information opened!

Searching old census records is both exhilarating and frustrating as there is so much room for error on so many levels. To begin with, the original census records are handwritten in cursive. Ancestry.com has a pretty good search function that also captions the handwriting, making it easier to read, but the captions sometimes misinterpret what is written. Then there's the possibility of human error: sometimes the census enumerators misspelled people’s names, and sometimes people changed the spelling of their names (or did not know how to spell them), or maybe the writing is too faded or too sloppy to read. Then there's the inconsistency with how people, and especially married women, are listed: for instance, sometimes women are listed by their own married names, and sometimes they are listed as Mrs. Husband’s Name, and sometimes they are under their maiden name or another married name, if they remarried at some point. And finally, sometimes the census enumerators outright missed people because no one was home when they knocked, or perhaps the person answering the survey gave inaccurate information, so you end up looking for a record that simply doesn't exist. 

All this means that even if you have a definite name and permanent address for someone, you still might have trouble finding their census records (if the records exist). The difficulties only compound when you're starting out with little more than scraps of information. When she gave me the pink piece of paper with Hanna Ruthenberg and Tille Carre written on it, Linda Bussey noted that she didn't know if both sisters had married or if one or both had worked for the Howers under a different name, but she did know they'd been born in Holmes County, which could be helpful for finding them in the census records.  

I decided to start my census search with the Hower House because I knew the full names of all the family members who’d lived there as well as the exact address of the house (60 Fir), and from there I could see who the live-in servants were. I was hoping I'd find Tille, Hanna, Valinda Hurley, and also the names I'd read in the travel letters at the very beginning of my research: Flossie, Tisch, Mrs. Logston, Mrs. Lugostine, and maybe even that catty Georgette. 

Therefore, I was nearly tearing out my hair when I couldn’t find all the census records for the Howers. Specifically, I was missing the 1920 census record for Blanche Hower, who was considered the head of the house after Otis’s death in 1916. I knew she hadn’t moved, so why did she disappear in 1920? Where was the Hower House?

It turns out that women, along with their work, can easily disappear in census records. In Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America, Faye E. Dudden discusses how women’s work was often left unrecorded in census records from the nineteenth century through much of the twentieth. In those early census surveys, the enumerators would ask about each person’s occupation and then categorize them in the census accordingly. Dudden points out that women were often listed as having no occupation for a variety of reasons. First, women, and particularly married women, were not expected to be breadwinners, so they may not have been asked about their occupations at all (74). If they were asked, many women engaged in part-time work, such as taking in sewing or giving music lessons, but they did not consider this work to be their occupation, so they would not list it for the census. Moreover, women whose paid work took place in their own homes, such as those who took in lodgers or ran boarding houses, were often listed as having no occupation (75). 

Even Blanche Hower, who was not only president of the Akron Selle Company but also served on Akron’s school board and in the Ohio State Legislature, is listed as having no occupation in the census records.

Accordingly, there was a bit of a learning curve for me when it came to searching and reading census records, especially when looking for women. Searches have to be broad enough to include alternate spellings and misspellings of names (as well as incorrect birth or death dates, places of birth, and so on), yet they have to be specific enough to narrow down the search results to mostly pertinent records. Then you have to search from different angles, such as looking for the person's house address instead of their name, or perhaps looking for their spouse as a roundabout way of finding them. Eventually, I figured out that Blanche was listed not as Blanche Hower but as Mrs. Otis Hower in the missing 1920 record.

I looked through each year of the census to see if any servants were listed as residing at the Hower House, and I did find a few, but not nearly as many as I’d been anticipating. There was one servant listed as living there in 1900 (while John H. Hower was still in residence) named Ella B. Quigly, then two servants living there in 1910 with Otis and Blanche named William Hurley and Elsa Egler.  There were no servants listed as living at the house in 1920, 1930, or 1940.  Where were Hanna Ruthenberg, Tille Carr, Augusta Strickroth, and even Valinda Hurley? Where were Flossie and Tisch? And was this William Hurley somehow related to Valinda? 

I knew there had to be more Hower servants hiding in these records, but I just wasn't finding them yet. My luck didn't change until I stopped pulling out my hair, embraced the craziness of historical documents, and got more creative with my searches.  I'll talk about what I found in my next post.


Works Referenced

Dudden, Faye E. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America. Wesleyan UP: Hanover NH, 1983.

Price, Mark. Email to Christi Blythin. 06 Feb 2022.

---. "Local History: Her Story Can Be Told." Akron Beacon Journal. Online. 16 Feb 2020. https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/2020/02/16/local-history-her-story-can/1695457007/

United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910. Akron, Ohio, USA. Via Ancestry.com.

---. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Akron, Ohio, USA. Via Ancestry.com.