If you take a beginning genealogy course you will often learn, as I did many years ago, that the 1790 census was destroyed by fire when the British invaded Washington D.C., during the War of 1812. But is this explanation true, or one of the myths of genealogy? Some believe that the early censuses were actually lost at the state level and not burned by the British. They point to the law that was in effect at the time and to a 1909 government publication for their evidence.
The U.S. Constitution calls for a periodic population census to be taken. The first Congress passed an act in 1790 which required that marshals from each state be appointed to oversee the census process in that state. These marshals then designated assistant marshals, who were the actual census enumerators, to travel throughout their territory obtaining the census information for each household.
For the first four censuses, the government didn’t provide printed forms for the census enumerators. This is why you see every column hand-written and ruled when you look up the original. The enumerators had to provide their own paper and supplies. Census takers were paid up to two cents per head to enumerate the census. This barely paid their expenses of buying the paper, pens, and ink, and traveling long distances to enumerate people. The census began on Aug. 2, 1790, and the enumerators had nine months to complete the enumeration. They were to record the makeup of households as they were on the first day of August 1790.
After the census was completed, the assistant marshals were to make two extra copies of the census for their district and post these in public places for inspection and correction, if necessary. Then the original census returns were to be sent to, and deposited with, the clerks in each state’s U.S. District Court. The two extra copies were kept either with the State Marshal or with the county’s officials.
It wasn’t until 1830 that a law was passed to mandate that the original census copies, which were supposed to be in the care of the clerks of the U.S. District Courts, be sent to the Library of Congress. At this point, many of the census returns did not make it to the Library of Congress.
In 1907, another act was passed by Congress that ordered the 1790 census enumerations to be published and offered for sale. This is when it was noticed that roughly 1/3 of the returns were missing. It is assumed that they were either lost by the clerks of the District Courts or lost in transit to the Library of Congress.
This all happened many years after the British burned Washington, DC. So what actually burned on that August day in 1814? A 1909 government publication titled “A Century of Population Growth From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth 1790-1900,” implies that only the statistical summaries of the first census were burned: “… it is a question whether anything more than the marshal’s summary was burned, if the First Census law was complied with, the original returns must have been in the custody of the clerk of the district court …”
Then there is the question of what ever happened to the other two copies that the enumerators were required to make. It is possible that some of these are still with county or state officials, lying around unidentified. Currently the census returns for Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine (then a part of Massachusetts), New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Vermont are extant and available to the public. The returns for Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, Tennessee and Virginia have never been found.
