“How could Mother have another child that I somehow forgot? How could my brother and I not remembered our very own sister?”

But how accurate are censuses? I’ve often heard stories about census-takers who were too drunk to do their jobs properly, or stories about those census-takers who depended upon neighbors to tell them about families nearby rather than walk the entire neighborhood.

We’ve all seen the crazy misspellings and “off” birth years and birth places, but for the most part the censuses are my favorite resource, providing family relationships and useful hints as to where vital records may be found.

And yet… I just had a brush with a census record that is obviously, blatantly, amazingly incorrect. It’s not a Wren census, but it is interesting enough I thought I’d share it with you.

(Click on this image for a larger view)

While you can see the family in the image above, I removed the surname because the dear lady still surviving from that family would like her privacy protected from Google searches. But you can click on the image for a larger view.

I had pulled up this census as a favor to my friend Bettie, who was glad to receive it. But when she took it home and examined it she received an enormous shock: according to the census image she and her brother had a sister!

“Goodness,” she told me on the phone. “I thought, ‘How could Mother have another child that I somehow forgot? How could my brother and I not remembered our very own sister?’”

What was even more shocking to Bettie was the idea that the lost sister could’ve been a twin (please note that the ages given on the census for Bettie and Jane-Anne were crossed out and rewritten.)

Bettie was 6 and her brother was 10 when this census was taken, certainly old enough to remember a sister, or at the very least remember a cousin or a friend who might have been living with them at the time, but she couldn’t remember any family members with that name. “I couldn’t remember a neighbor named ‘Jane-Anne’, either.”

Still, Bettie didn’t immediately assume the census was in error. She thought perhaps she and her brother DID have a sister, and perhaps that sister was lost to the family in such a traumatic way that she and her brother couldn’t remember her.

“You do hear about such things happening,” she said. “I doubted that happened to us, but I thought it could be possible.”

So before she called me she contacted all her surviving relatives who were old enough to remember the early 1930s and asked them if they remembered a little Jane-Anne. Nobody could.

Then she asked them if they’d ever heard of Bettie’s mother having two girls instead of one. Nobody had.

She looked through all her old photo albums. No luck, there, either.

Since any children living in the neighborhood would’ve attended the same school as Bettie and her brother, she looked through all her old yearbooks, but again, found nothing.

She finally called me. “The idea that my brother and I could’ve lived our lives not remembering a sister was an incredible shock, but after talking to my family, I have to tell you: I think that census is wrong.”

I turned to the California birth index and quickly found Bettie and her brother listed as born in the 1920s, but I couldn’t find a Jane-Anne with that surname. I searched by surname (just in case Bettie’s father had a previous marriage) as well as Bettie’s mother’s maiden name for all counties in California, but could only determine that Bettie’s mother had only two children in the state of California. And since Bettie’s mother was born and raised in San Diego County, it seemed unlikely she would’ve left the state to have a third child.

Thinking perhaps Jane-Anne was a relative or a friend after all (despite Bettie’s research), I then searched the CA birth indexes for any child of that first name, or combination of first names, but found no one of the right age.

I then searched through the California Death Index for a person named Jane-Anne who might have died in California after 1930. When that proved fruitless, I made separate searches by first name only, surname only, mother’s maiden name only, and birth year only, but I couldn’t find any person who matched.

While it is possible that there actually was a Jane-Anne out there somewhere who happened to be in the house when the census was enumerated, Bettie and I concluded that this really was just a census-taker error, probably one of the most blatant ones I’ve ever seen. But then the problem became: “How do we alert future generations to this error?”

Some possibilities we discussed included her writing a letter she could keep in her family Bible, copies of which she could tuck into all her family photo albums; a letter explaining what had happened when she first viewed the 1930 census, and how after interviewing her surviving relatives, she concluded the census-taker had made a mistake.

(If you readers have any more suggestions, I’d love to hear them.)

After Bettie and I hung up, I realized how often I depend upon family relationships listed in censuses, and yet I rarely have the luxury of a living relative to check them over and say, “Yes, that’s right” or “Who the heck is that?”

Bettie and I may never solve the mystery of Jane-Anne. But the missing little girl is a excellent reminder to remember that censuses can have more than just odd little errors; they can have some whopping big ones, too.