Yes, it has been a long time and I won't bore you with the details of why. Hopefully I will be able to post at least once a month although things change very slowly in the world of dead ends (or else they wouldn't be brick walls, right?)
So, I have a question for you all. Is anyone else having difficulty locating family in the 1870 census? I have several families where I have them in 1860 and 1880 but cannot find them in 1870. Is there something about that census that I need to know? It's like trying to find them on the 1890 census (genealogy joke).
I do have a quasi theory on this - perhaps they were "laying low" after the War Between The States. (Yes, I call it that because Civil War implies a war within one country. The Confederate states had seceded.) Many of my relations supported the side that did not prevail; actually, all of them that I have found were Confederate soldiers. (I thought I had a Yankee one time but it turned out to be same name, same year of birth, but different person.)
Another researcher of one of my lines said that his branch of the family had passed down a story that the family left Alabama because in that part of the state Confederate sympathizers were harassed and treated badly after the war. Basically, they were run off. This makes me wonder if my family may have been in transition and missed on the census, or perhaps did something to hide their identity during the years following the war.
Which leads me to another discussion - judgment. I don't judge my ancestors. I didn't live their life, in their time, and regardless of the amount of research I do into their lives, I really have no way to know what it was truly like to be them. It doesn't matter to me if they were married when their children were born, if they divorced, or which side of a war they were on. I'm sure many researcher has run into the same resistance I have when interviewing older family members who don't want to spill it because something was embarrassing (to them).
As a family history researcher I have set judgment aside. I keep an open mind to any possibility and let the facts stand as is.
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