Meli's right, the transcribers do make mistakes, but so did the census 
takers.  And if your "informant" at the door giving the information is an 
uneducated foreign servant, or a child, for instance, the poor census taker 
often just phonetically did the best he/she could do.

There is another problem I have encountered here in San Diego County; the 
census never got to parts of it.  Our border region is very poorly 
documented.

I have located names using land use maps, directories, newspaper accounts, 
school records, etc that never show up, in spite of their residence here for 
several decades.

Good luck.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Melissa Diamanti" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, May 24, 2010 10:09 AM
Subject: Re: Potters


Ancestry.com is very useful, and I use it a lot. But the transcribers didn't 
always get the names right, so the entry won't come up in a search. In some 
cases, I ended up leaving through all the pages for my community and period, 
to find names that should have come up from a search but didn't. And 
sometimes they just aren't there, or turn up in a neighboring township 
instead.
Good luck hunting.
Meli Diamanti

--- On Mon, 5/24/10, Carl Steen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


From: Carl Steen <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Potters
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Monday, May 24, 2010, 12:32 PM


Hi all-

Has anyone ever heard of a potter named F.E. Justice? He was in the 
Edgefield, SC area in 1870. I've tried searching the census via 
Ancestry.com, but the name never shows up.

thanks



Carl Steen