Recalculating John D. Lewis's Estimated Age

   ©  Kathy Duncan, 2023

While working on my post for Daniel Adams Lewis, son of John D. Lewis, I found myself scrolling through Daniel Lewis's 1830 Jackson County, Alabama census entry. Having just looked at the Family Maps of Jackson County, Alabama, I noticed that on the census he was surrounded by the same men who were around him on the map. I noticed my ancestor, William Mason, and paused long enough to wonder if I had located his 1830 census entry before. His name looks like "Ulm Mason," so I wondered if he might have been indexed in some wonky that would have prevented me from finding him with the search engine on Family Search. Then I scrolled to the next page and gasped. There was John Lewis, and I knew immediately that he was not the John Lewis that I had previously identified on the 1830 census in a previous post. I was just as sure that this was "my" John Lewis and that the other John Lewis I had identified was not.

So what had gone wrong before? After flipping back and forth between tabs and the search engine. I realized that there was only one John Lewis appearing in the Family Search index/search engine:

A careful inspection of the page that "my" John Lewis appears on in Jackson County, Alabama reveals that Family Search indexed him as "John Seuss" rather than John Lewis, which makes him unfindable with a search engine:

Notice that James Cotton was indexed as James Catton and Wm Dottery does not appear below "John Seuss" in the indexing although I think he probably turns up in a search. I'm not sure why all of the names on this page do not appear on the image index. It is the same situation for the page before this which contains the sons of John Lewis. 

I will use the information from the image index to edit John Lewis's name in the index and will create a post on how to do that. 

When I found this error on my part, a little voice in my head started chiming "make a U-turn at your earliest convenience, make a U-turn at your earliest convenience. . .recalculating, recalculating."

This time I am going to calculate John Lewis's age from 1840 backward.

Here is John Lewis on the 1840 McNairy County, Tennessee census:

1840 McNairy County, Tennessee Census

John Lewis 000100001-100011

one male 15 - 19 = unknown male
one male 60 - 69 = John Lewis
one female 1 - 4 = Emily Lewis
one female 20 - 29 = Jane Lewis
one female 30 - 39 = Jane (Dameron) Hambrick Lewis

This census brackets John Lewis's birth date as being from 1771 at the earliest and 1780 at the latest.

Clicking on the next image reveals the enslaved persons in John Lewis's 1840 household:

0101-01

one male 10 -23 = unknown male

one male 36 - 54 = unknown male

one female 10 - 23 = unknown female

Now the "new" 1830 Jackson County, Alabama census entry:

John Lewis 01010001-00200001

one male 5-9 = John Lewis? one unknown? two unknowns?
one male 15-19 = Spencer Lewis? John Lewis?
one male 50-59 = John Lewis
two females 10-14 = Elizabeth Lewis, Jane Lewis
one female 50-59 = wife of John Lewis

On this census, John Lewis's birth date is still in the 1771 to 1780 range. Of greater importance is the presence of a wife for John Lewis. Her birth date range is also 1771 to 1780, making her a contemporary of John's. Traditionally, she has been identified as Susan Daniel although there is no documentation, as yet, to support that. Certainly, the interaction between John Lewis and the Daniel family makes it very likely that she was a Daniel. John Lewis's wife must have died sometime between the 1830 census and John Lewis's marriage to Jane (Dameron) Hambrick prior to daughter Emily Lewis's birth in 1838. 

Clicking on the next image in Family Search reveals the enslaved persons in the John Lewis household in 1830:

The second line in this image corresponds to the line that John Lewis is on:

102-101

one male 1-9 = unknown male
two males 24-35 = two unknown males
one female 1-9 = unknown female
one female 24-35 = unknown female

There are only partially surviving census records for Alabama and Tennessee in 1820. John Lewis seems to have been in Alabama by 1817 when his daughter Jane Lewis was born, but he does not appear on the surviving 1820 census for Alabama.

In 1810, John Lewis is most likely to be the John Lewis on the Knox County, Kentucky census:

John Lewis 2201-3001

two males 1-9 = Joel D. Lewis, Daniel A. Lewis
two males 10-15 = Wiley Lewis, Henry Lewis
one male 26 - 44 =  John Lewis
three females 1-9 = Celia Lewis, Matilda Lewis
one female 26-44 = wife of John Lewis

no enslaved persons

The ages for the adults fall into a larger birth date bracket than the later censuses. For 1810 both adults' ages can be bracketed as being no earlier than 1766 and no later than 1784. The result is that both John Lewis and his wife's birth dates remain in the 1771 to 1780 bracket, which remains basically the same as I had concluded previously. At this point, I need another record to help narrow down their birth dates.

The lesson here is to look beyond search engine results. The old census indexes in book form would come in handy for this.