SPECIAL PROJECTS
Escambia County, Florida
Census Transcription Project
1850 CENSUS INTRODUCTION
This effort began in Jan 2000 and was completed on 2 Nov 2000. The names of the dedicated group of people from the WFGS who made this transcription possible are listed at the top of the transcription.
In this census, for the first time in U.S. censuses, the names and other pertinent data of all the members of the household are entered. You can sit back and scroll down through early Pensacola history. Note that the number just to the right of the names is the household number. All people with the same household number were considered by the enumerator to be a part of that household, whether kin, in-laws, boarders or just friends. You can see married daughters in the household with their husbands, aged parents, newborn babies and servants. The old families whose surnames are carried today on Pensacola’s streets are listed. You can see what the family’s property holdings were and what they did for a living, where they were born and whether they could read or write. If you are researching family connections, this is a great place to start. Clues abound. All you have to do is run down the evidence to support the inferred connections -- a vastly easier task than having to figure out potential connections from scratch. So enjoy the trip down through history but keep the following cautions in mind.
There were many pages in this census that had numerous names that were illegible. A few pages had almost all the names faded nearly beyond reading. Much time has been devoted to trying to bring out the faded portions to get a better idea of what was written on the page and often a name was recovered only to be changed again in later observations. Transcribers and proofreaders alike may have been in error in recovering some of the more illegible of the names on this census. So, if you don’t see who you are looking for, try searching by state of birth and age or by known names of other household members.
Most times questionable entries are in brackets like [this.] Other areas where neither transcribers nor proofreaders could make out any of the lettering at all in that area are indicated by a question mark. But sometimes a faint name may have been read incorrectly and entered as such with no indication that it is in error. Cross checks with the censuses before and after 1850 cleared up some of the errors but many of the people at the Navy Yard were here only for this one census. In short, be careful that you don’t give up on an ancestor being in this census because you don’t find them in this transcription. While the vast majority of the names are accurate, yours might be in the few percent that are entered incorrectly. In addition, the names were entered exactly as they appeared on the census. This results in names like Hayes being entered as Haze because that’s how the enumerator spelled it.
In blocks that had no entry a “--” has been entered to indicate that this block was empty -- and to hold that cell open during the conversion process from the Excel worksheet to HTML.
