It was 1900; William McKinley was president, Edward Scofield was governor of Wisconsin, and Patrick H. Cashin was mayor of Stevens Point, a city of 9,524 inhabitants. North Division Street ended in a swamp before it reached Fourth Avenue, and what is now Goerke Park was the fairgrounds, out in the country. The country was still talking about its recent war with Spain, and Congress has just gotten around to directing that a twelfth census be taken of the United States.
In 1900, a permanent Bureau of the Census did not yet exist. Instead, every ten years Congress simply passed its customary decennial Census Act establishing a census office and ordaining in general what it was to accomplish. Those appointed to the office then set about hiring staff and an army of enumerators and supervisors, usually untrained if not unsuited for the job, who proceeded to gather and tabulate the census data, and then the entire office disbanded.
Experience with the 1880 census had shown, however, that tabulating census data was fast becoming a full-time job. It had taken nine years to complete work on the 1880 census, and it was even feared that tabulating the 1890 census (now lost) would not be finished by the time the 1900 census was to be taken. (It was, in fact, completed in seven years, owing largely to the use of rudimentary tabulating machines which had been invented expressly for the purpose.) Gains in efficiency were offset by demands from Congress for more enumeration detail, and by the massive immigration which had swollen the 1900 population to half again its 1880 size.
Enumerators were trained, and given volumes of material to read, but their job was hard. Traveling by horse and buggy on dirt roads, they encountered foreign languages, uncooperative residents, and others who simply did not know what the census was all about. The newspapers had given much advance publicity to the census, listing the questions that would be asked, and reminding the public that compliance was mandatory, but this was a time when one person in ten was foreign-born, and one in nine was illiterate.
The enumerators themselves were a mixed lot. For the first time in 1900, enumerators received their appointment only after passing a written exam, which they could take at home. The exam consisted of a narrative description of a hypothetical family, and a blank form identical to the population schedule that would be used to record the census. The would-be enumerator was to fill out the schedule from the given data and return it to the district supervisor. Of the 300,000 persons who submitted applications, one out of six failed this test. Of the remaining group, 53,173 were chosen as enumerators. They had the entire month of June to finish their task, but June 1 was the official date of record. Babies born after that date were not to be counted; on the other hand, anyone alive on the first of June was to be counted, even if they had died by the time the census taker came to call.
All of the enumerators had learned penmanship in school, but they were more or less successful at it. Spelling of names became a challenge, especially when the enumerator and his subject were of different ethnic extractions, and did not speak each other’s language. Consequently, many of the names you will find in the census schedules, and in this index, are horribly misspelled. Known errors have been corrected, but the reader is urged to try every possible variant spelling of a name, and every possible misspelling (and perhaps some impossible ones as well) before concluding that the person being sought is not in the census.
Families are indexed as a group, for ease of identification, and alphabetized by surname. Exceptions to the family grouping occur when family members have a different surname (married daughters living at home, stepchildren, mothers-in-law, etc.); these are indexed separately. Every person enumerated in 1900 is in the index somewhere; the only exceptions are twelve Felician sisters of the Polonia orphanage who were counted but not listed by name. Each entry gives, in the right-hand column, the page number of the census schedule where the name can be found. On the microfilm, look for the number in the upper right-hand corner. A few persons were erroneously counted twice, but there is no evidence of the "padding" of which some earlier enumerators had been accused.
The census schedules give the location (including street address and house number if in the city); name; relationship to the head of household; race; sex; date of birth (month and year); age; marital status; if married, how many years; for mothers, mother of how many children; nativity (place of birth, father’s place of birth, mother’s place of birth); if foreign born, year of immigration, number of years in the US, and naturalization status; occupation, trade, or profession for each person 10 years of age and over; education (attended school, can read, can write, can speak English); ownership of home.
Some of the names on the films are exceedingly difficult to read. Poor penmanship plus an attitude of "spell it like it sounds" combine to make a hard puzzle for the genealogist to solve. Add to this the habit of the auditors in the census office of writing their notations directly over the names, and the result may be a combination impossible to decipher. At their best, enumerators wrote in an elegant hand, but at their worst, one wishes they had foregone the flourishes and printed in simple block letters. Considerable effort has gone into resolving these difficulties for the production of this index, but unfortunately many necessarily remain.
Enumerators of the 1900 Census |
Unit |
Census Pages |
Population |
Enumerator |
Town of Alban |
1A – 9B |
878 |
Lewie Halverson |
Town of Almond |
10A – 20B |
1,080 |
Wayne F. Cowan |
Town of Amherst |
21A – 31B, 38A – 41B |
1,425 |
Clifford F. Smith, Thomas C. E. Sand |
Village of Amherst |
32A – 37B |
558 |
Thomas C. E. Sand |
Town of Belmont |
42A – 49B |
781 |
Peter N. Brandt |
Town of Buena Vista |
50A – 61B |
1,102 |
Lewis E. Wentworth |
Town of Carson |
69A – 84B |
1,505 |
Charles H. Dake |
Town of Dewey |
303A – 310B |
754 |
John McHugh |
Town of Eau Pleine |
85A – 95B |
1,086 |
Gustave Borth |
Town of Grant |
96A – 101B |
557 |
John W. Bovee |
Town of Hull |
108A – 122B |
1,469 |
Myron E. Van Order |
Town of Lanark |
123A – 131B |
825 |
Thomas Swan |
Town of Linwood |
62A – 68B |
677 |
Charles H. Dake |
Town of New Hope |
132A – 141B |
962 |
John A. Hole |
Town of Pine Grove |
102A – 107B |
565 |
John W. Bovee |
Town & Village of Plover |
142A – 158B |
1,611 |
Silas D. Clark, Burton S. Fox |
Town of Sharon |
159A – 181B |
2,225 |
August Oesterle, Henry Schliesman |
First Ward, Stevens Point |
182A – 196B |
1,448 |
Henry J. Halverson |
Second Ward, Stevens Point |
197A – 213B |
1,699 |
Warren L. Bronson |
Third Ward, Stevens Point |
223A – 241B |
1,600 |
John W. Strope |
Fourth Ward, Stevens Point |
242A – 265B |
2,313 |
John H. Wallace |
Fifth Ward, Stevens Point |
266A – 282B |
1,623 |
Daniel J. Leahy |
Sixth Ward, Stevens Point |
214A – 222B |
841 |
Warren L. Bronson |
Town of Stockton |
283A – 302B |
1,899 |
William L. Arnott, Grace M. Arnott |
Total Population |
29,483 |