John Brown and the 1860 Census

  ©  Kathy Duncan, 2021

In my previous post, I was lamenting the fact that I could not find John Deloss Brown on the 1860 census. I had looked for him several times and just could not locate him. While John Brown is not the easiest name to research, by 1860 he had a wife and three children, who should have either been with him or somewhere else on the census. I could not find any of them. I was starting to think that either their household was overlooked or recorded on a damaged page of the census. 

There was one John Brown on the Champaign County, Illinois census who SHOULD have been the John Brown I was seeking. He was the right age and born in the right place. As a bonus, he lived very near John Brown's brother Augustus Leroy Brown and Conrad Hay, who I suspect was their uncle. But that John Brown was living with a seemingly random family and without a wife and children. 

The other night I went back to look at that John Brown one more time and kept asking myself, why isn't he "my" John Brown?? As my eye skimmed down the page to Augustus Brown's household, it hung on two names: Nancy and Emma. Hey, those were the names of John Brown's wife and daughter! I leaned in for a closer look and there were John Brown's wife and three children in the household between the one he was in and his brother's household. Wife Nancy, daughters Emma and Eva, and son Joel H. Brown were in the household of John Racine.

Or were they?

The census taker crossed out the birthplaces of John Brown and John Racine and then interchanged them. He also wrote over their ages to correct them. 

So what when wrong? I've read that some census takers made notes as they made their rounds and then neatly transferred their information onto official census forms in the evening. In this insistence, the census taker may have gotten off by a line, recording the two men in the wrong households. Then realized his mistake and tried to correct it. Or he may have been taking a proxy report from the Brown family on the inhabitants of the neighbor's household and put the two men in the wrong order on the form. 

Either way, the end result is that the census taker did not correct which households the men were living in. He also did not correct the tick mark that made John Brown a person over the age of 20 who could not read or write. In fact, John Brown was known at the time of his death as a lifelong, avid reader. I've seen misspelled names and poor handwriting before but this mix up is a first. 

This census placed John Brown and his family in Town 19 N Range 8 E of Champaign County, which was Champaign Township. Tolono, Illinois is on the border of that township. That means John Deloss Brown only traveled a few miles to meet Lincoln's presidential train at the Tolono station in 1861.