Bluestone Genealogy

One of my previous posts discussed my British ancestors and their presence in the UK census. I wanted to write about another family who  only shared a few short years together , compared to the Duce's many years (give or take) which was reflected in 30 years of census records. The sad story of Samuel and Charlotte Shorten is told between the 1841 and 1851 census. Samuel Shorten was the son of John Shorten and his second wife Christiana, born in Washbrook, Suffolk, England in 1815. He was the half-brother of my 3x great grandfather, Goymer Shorten (which makes him my half-3rd great granduncle). Samuel married Charlotte Parsons in Swaffham, a civil parish and market town in Norfolk, England in June 1839 when he was 24 years old and she was 18. By October that year, Samuel was working with his father who was selling pigs at the local Ipswich market in Suffolk [source: Bury and Norwich Post, 16 October 1839]. By the time of the 1841 census, Samuel and his wife Charlotte...

One of the things in genealogy that turns me absolutely green with envy, is the availability of census information for Britain and the USA. Before censuses, musters were the most common way of recording information about the population. However census records contain much more detailed information such as the specific address, who is the head of the household, who is living in the house at the time of the census date, their relationship to the head of house, everyone's age, where they were born, and their occupations. For genealogists, census records are a valuable source of information. The earliest systematic collection of information about Australia's residents occurred in 1788, with the colonies and states regularly collecting data via musters or censuses, up until the first Australian national census in 1911, ten years after Federation. However, in 1892, all surviving Victorian census records...were pulped. Pulped! There are a few records that contain small a...