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Quick Tip: Finding townships in census records

Previously published in Ancestry Daily News, 15 May 2002 and written by Dottie Stokes

I am currently researching in my home state of Iowa. I grew up there, but have been gone since 1958. While working on my census reports, I found many new Townships which I didn't remember. I guess I didn't pay that much attention to things like that. So, I went to http://www.topozone.com and made a map of my home county of Des Moines County, as well as all the immediate counties around -- Lee, Louisa, Henry, and since Des Moines County falls on the Mississippi River. I also printed some maps of Illinois.

The project took a while, but this was a fun craft. I taped all the pages together, and then taped it to the wall near my computer. When I go into my census reports now, I can check the map, and see where I am. When I find a family member in a census report, I go to the map and mark it with their name and year of census. Each of the Townships are already on the map, I just highlighted them with a colored marker, and also darkened the borders on the counties. This helped my old eyes a bit.

When I finished making this map, and found how handy it was, I then went to http://www.mapquest.com and looked up my hometown of Burlington, Iowa. And yes, you guessed right, I made a large street map of it. It's also hanging on the wall.

I discovered some interesting things while going through the 1910 and 1920 Census. Since most of the Iowa censuses have added street names, you can trace where your families lived. Did they still remain in the same location over the years or were they constantly moving? I discovered that my mother's (who was only one years old or eleven years old during these two different census periods) family lived in the same place but her first husband lived within a five-minute walk from her family home. Her third husband lived halfway between both of them. Of course they didn't know each other. Her third husband, my father, was married and had a family already. In fact, the home he lived in was two doors down from where I grew up as a child. And today the house she grew up in still stands. I have relatives still living there.

I mark my street map also, and I know where most of my relatives lived at the beginning of the 20th Century. They all lived close in proximity --- most of them in walking distance. All were close to the Oak Street Baptist Church that was started by my German ancestors. I'm discovered a lot about my family, things I never knew while growing up, just by making a couple of maps and keeping track of their movements over the years. I wish some of the earlier census reports were as helpful as the later ones.

Oh, and by the way, on my large county map, there are also some of the cemeteries listed in the area. I know most of my family was buried in Aspen Grove Cemetery, but I had other family that was buried, near where they lived their last years. I have also marked these on my county map.