The 1820 Knox County, Ohio, Census -- Problems and Solutions

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Diana, Goddess of the Hunt — for Ancestors!

Every-Name Index

The 1820 Knox County, Ohio, Census — Problems and Solutions,
including a Corrected Index and Full Extraction of the Records

Index to Householders in the 1820 Knox, County, Ohio, Census

Townships completed so far: Chester, Jackson, Pike, Union, part of Morgan.

Anyone who has worked with the 1820 census microfilm of Knox County, Ohio, immediately becomes aware that the pages are seriously out of order. A reading of NARA's Introduction to the film reveals one reason: the original Knox County schedules were unbound, flattened, and rebound. The result is that townships within the county are no longer contiguous, which would only be an inconvenience were it not for the fact that many of the township names (written in the left margins, not in the column headings), have faded into unreadability. Nor can you rely on using the Table of Contents on the NARA microfilm itself as a guide to township (see link below to "bogus" NARA Table of Contents). That the pages were microfilmed in reverse sequence — ending with Mt. Vernon Twp., which is, in fact, the start of the Knox Co. enumeration — does not reduce the confusion.

The most serious consequence of the disrupted page order and faded township names is that some individuals have been placed in the wrong township in the FamilyTreeMaker 1820 Census Index (Broderbund CD-314) and the index online at GenealogyLibrary.com — and in who knows how many other indices or extractions from this film. At the very least, it is exceptionally tedious to find and search any particular township on this microfilm, what with the NARA Table of Contents being totally useless.

I hope detailed, accurate tables of contents and a new pagination will save you some hair-pulling when it comes to using the 1820 Knox County, Ohio, census microfilm, which includes part of what became Morrow County, Ohio, in 1848.

The Bogus NARA Table of Contents
with a Corrected Version

A Detailed, Page-by-Page Table of Contents
for the 1820 Knox County, Ohio, Census Microfilm,
in Which the Pages Were Filmed Out of Sequence

A TrueTable of Contents
for the 1820 Knox County, Ohio, Census
with Pages Returned to Their Original Order
and a New, Logical Sequence of Page Numbers

I have begun extracting the data from the 1820 Knox County, Ohio, census and will place the pages online as I finish them, updating the index as I go. But it may take me some time to get through — or I may never finish — so at least the ToC's linked above will help you work with the microfilm. A link to township evolution is also included below, which is necessary for understanding location through the early censuses.

Township Evolution of Knox County, Ohio

Diagrammatic Maps of Knox County, Ohio,
in the Census Years from 1810 to 1850

Source:

1. Family Quest Archives: Ohio Federal Census 1820: Clark, Coshocton, Gallia, Hocking, Huron, Knox, Lawrence, Meigs, and Monroe Counties. Heritage Quest CD M33-88.

UPDATE: For subscription fees, digital images and indices to the 1820 Census are now available online at Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com. An index to 1820 is also available online at GenealogyLibrary.com.

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Every-Name Index