As you strive for success in your research, you will combine a variety of sources and techniques appropriate to each ancestor’s unique situation. Research Tip 4 encouraged you to investigate federal land records. Now, Research Tip 5 focuses on three more record groups that contain information on thousands of ancestors—possibly some of yours: census records, manuscript collections, and The Territorial Papers of the United States.

Census Records. Federal and state census records are among the most valuable and most universally used sources for genealogists. Many of these records contain gems of detail. If you skip a census, saying “Oh, I know where they were living; I don’t need to look at it,” you may miss something important.

My favorite gem of information from a census record is the paragraph that a conscientious census taker added to the 1830 census entry for Abiel Fellows of St. Joseph County, Michigan (p. 180). If Fellows was my ancestor, I’d be dancing a jig upon finding this information. The spelling and lack of punctuation are from the original; I’ve added the word in brackets:

This man is sixty five [years] of age has nineteen living children ten of which is under his care was a soldier in the Revolution is a man of Sober Habits of unusual enterprise and great strenght of mind has never received any thing from our government for his Early and Youthful strugle for Independence is it to late to hope??

In 1850, the federal census began naming members of free households and asking more questions of the population. One question from 1850 and 1860 was intended to identify couples who had married within the year prior to the census—between 1 June 1849 and 31 May 1850 or between 1 June 1859 and 31 May 1860. However, some census takers interpreted the instructions differently. Instead of a tick mark for only these newly-weds, these census takers listed the year of marriage for all the couples in their district!

Some census takers added helpful notes about the people they enumerated. Such notes can be valuable to genealogists, especially in the censuses between 1850 and 1870, when family relationships were only suggested but not stated. Examples of such gems include notes about individuals or groups within the household—“living with son,” “ill with consumption,” “in confinement” (about to give birth), “grandchildren,” “twins,” “orphans,” and “minor heirs of James S. Pritchard.” Some census takers listed household members by initials only, but others provided complete names, including middle names. Other enumerators, instead of listing only the U.S. state or foreign country where household members were born, recorded the county or city of birth! These kinds of gems can be amazing “gifts.”

You may be surprised at other information you can learn, especially in censuses from 1850 forward. Different censuses used different questions, but all the censuses from 1850 forward included information on gender, race, age, birthplace, and occupation. Other questions asked about each person’s relationship to the head of household, marital status, birthplaces of one’s parents, the value of the family’s real estate, who attended school within the year, who could not read and write, who may have been deaf or blind, identification of veterans, the year of immigration, the year of naturalization, how many children a mother had borne and how many were living in 1900 and 1910, whether the home was rented or owned, and (in 1930) whether the family owned a radio.

In order to discover all the information these records hold on your ancestors, you need to look for your ancestral families in all the censuses taken during their lifetimes. Not all states have taken state censuses, but quite a few have, usually between the federal censuses. These can provide another opportunity for your research. You never know what gems await you until you look.

For a list of all the census questions in federal censuses between 1790 and 1940 and information on accessing your ancestral census records, see Unpuzzling Your Past or The Genealogist's Companion and Sourcebook, 2nd edition.

Manuscript Collections. Numerous traditional genealogical sources—such as probate and land records, tombstones, vital records, newspaper obituaries and local news, county court records, state tax records, military and pension records, Social Security applications, and World War I draft registration cards—may contain unexpected information. Less widely used records include manuscript collections in local, county, state, or academic archives and museums. Often you can learn about their manuscript holdings and “special collections” on their web sites. Such manuscript collections house personal and family papers and letters as well as business and organization papers, including some church records. Academic archives may include yearbooks—with ancestral pictures—dating back to the school’s early years.

Investigate the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC, pronounced Nuck-Muck) online at http://www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/. You may also want to visit an academic library that holds the print volumes of this database (entries through 1993) and ask a reference or government documents librarian to show you how to use it. The online and print databases tell you where reported collections are housed and give you general information about their contents. You can then contact the holding institution for more information. It’s worth a try!

Territorial Papers. Another group of records that you may find in academic and other research libraries is The Territorial Papers of the United States. These are federal documents generated in the process of administering the territories before they became states. The records include letters between government officials and citizens, petitions from citizens to Congress, lists of militia and civilian officeholders in the territories, and reports on a variety of issues within the territories. If your ancestors lived in one of the territories, consider looking at these documents. For example, if an ancestor signed a petition asking Congress to establish a postal route into their community, you learn of an interesting episode in the ancestor’s life and evidence that he (most petition signers were men) was alive and in that place on the date of the petition signing. In genealogy, placing an ancestor in a given place at a given time is important evidence.

One of the most interesting aspects of reading the documents is the revelation that human nature doesn’t change. People behave as people whenever and wherever they live. A number of the documents reveal personalities and quirks of human behavior that provide entertaining reading—about somebody’s ancestors.

Check research libraries for their holdings of Territorial Papers either on microfilm or in print. (The microfilm and print series are only part of the original papers housed at the National Archives in Washington.) The twenty-eight print volumes, published between 1934 and 1975, are indexed and contain transcriptions of some of the territorial papers for Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio (Territory Northwest of the Ohio River), Tennessee (Territory South of the Ohio River), and Wisconsin. The several National Archives microfilm series of the papers are not indexed but show original documents, arranged by territory and in approximate chronological order. In the original records, you could find an ancestor’s signature! That’s always fun.

Great genealogical finds often occur in unexpected ways or come in unexpected packages. I urge you to try the record groups mentioned in Research Tips 4 and 5 if they apply to your ancestral times and places. Investigate other ancestral-period records as well; see The Genealogist's Companion and Sourcebook, 2nd edition, for ideas. You never know until you look.