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