1860 Census and Phillip Dinkell

[L Verge]

(12-09-2015 10:23 PM)maharba Wrote:  That must be her, must be Mary Johnson. Be interesting to know what family she ties back into, and why a young woman is living and working away from home. I was going to 'start a new thread'...but I don't know how to do it, here. Then I noticed this one with the Census in the header, so I just replied into here. If you google search Abraham Lincoln in Census (years), you don't find much very helpful. That is odd to me. When folks so much want to talk about a celebrity for a couple hundred years, but have almost nothing to discuss on such a visible topic as his Census reportings, that makes me wonder why. How come he is listed as
ABRAM Lincoln in 1850? I believe he made a cryptic comment once, that
hinted ABRAM was his name.

There were census takers in those days, just as now. The person being enumerated did not fill out the paperwork - the census taker did. If you have ever studied census records, you must surely know that spellings of names, etc. were pretty much at the whim of the census taker. They spelled the way it sounded; they abbreviated for the sake of speed; they misunderstood what the subject was saying, etc. Reading immigration records will baffle you and screw up your search also because of the same problems.

As to servant "Mary," we are talking of a period when there were many young girls who left their own homes in order to serve as housekeepers in someone else's as a legitimate way to earn a wage or to support one's self. This was especially true once the Irish (especially) and Germans began to immigrate here in good numbers, but it had been fairly common among American families earlier who had to send their children out to support the younger children at home. It was an honest and respected form of labor. This could apply to single women, widowed ladies, etc. who needed income. Do we have a clue as to this Mary's age?