Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,19
it.”
Nick made sure to send an annual donation to the Plutarch, but it was payment of this kind that really kept his welcome warm here.
Little Mrs. Fadge, profoundly deaf but always cheerful, helped Nick find the census microfilms he needed, though he didn’t really need her help. After promising her to have coffee and cookies when he finished his work, he entered the converted butler’s pantry that now housed five microfilm viewers, of sixties vintage and bulk, but in perfect, dustless order.
The subject of his research today was to be the 1880 census. This date would certainly be the latter end of this mysterious Balazar man’s possible life span. If he’d indeed come over in the period 1840-50, as Corban had asserted, he was then probably a young man of about eighteen. Add forty years, and in those days that was getting up there in age.
The government had by 1880 figured out the vast significance of the mandated prying every ten years. It had become clear that descendants of Mayflower passengers and of Virginia gentry would thenceforth constitute a diminishing percentage of the country’s populace. Someone in Washington decided it was time to find out who were these millions of new Americans Walt Whitman was singing about. Nick always found lots of good information in the 1880 census, though not as much as in the 1900. To researchers’ everlasting sorrow, most of the 1890 was destroyed by a fire in 1921.
But first, Nick needed to check the Soundex, a phonetic index that groups names by first letter and consonants.
The Works Progress Administration during the Depression was given the task of indexing certain censuses. Social Security was starting up, and it was essential to know who might be eligible, who would be turning 65 in 1935 and in the next few years. The census was the perfect place to look for a person’s year of birth. It’s the actual testimony of the person in question, or at least someone who knew him. Sometimes the only testimony.
For a country with a Babel of names from skyrocketing immigration, for vital records where clerks spelled for convenience, out of frustration, or by whim, the Soundex is a good place to start. But one caveat is that the 1880 Soundex includes only those households with children ten years old and under. These children, born between 1870 and 1880, were the ones who most probably would be alive to participate in the new Social Security program.
Nick had seen many amateurs tripped up by this last arcane detail: an ancestor may in fact be in the census proper, even if he doesn’t appear on the Soundex.
Keeping such knowledge to himself was job security, a way of ensuring that there would always be a need for professional genealogists, Nick reflected as he coded the surname Balazar.
In the darkened microfilm room, Nick used the Soundex code for Balazar–B426–to find the Balzar family, living in the old town of Natchitoches, Louisiana, Natchitoches Parish, 9 June 1880. He had already checked the twenty-eight then-existing parishes preceding Natchitoches alphabetically and had been reluctantly about to call it a day.
As always happened when he made an important find, a triumphant smile of discovery spread across his face, and an unmistakable shiver hit him between the shoulders. He sat under the hood of the reader, leaning into the tunnel of light which vouchsafed him a glimpse of a century earlier, savoring the moment, but also questioning his find–as a good genealogist must do, no matter how rock-solid the evidence seems.
The spelling similarity was too close to ignore, he thought, struggling to be the rational researcher. Simply a question of a missing vowel. Worse errors on birth certificates were common, he knew. In such cases, the midwife was confused, the doctor was guessing or too busy or too drunk to care, or no certificate was ever issued because the child was born in a sharecropper’s cabin with just the family around. And, of course, the enumerator wasn’t a detective; he wrote down what he thought he heard.
The rush of discovery flooded through his body again as he studied the projected image of the Soundex card before him. His eyes lingered on the line indicating “Color”: the head of household, Ivanhoe Balzar, was listed as a mulatto; on another card, so was his wife.
Either Nick’s hunch was incorrect, and these were not the people he was searching for, or Corban’s family tree had just become more complicated, even more interesting, and somewhat puzzling. Certainly, it was