Digging for Duplicates

So you've spent hours researching and you finally find the record you are looking for.  Yippy!  WooHoo!  You start doing a little happy dance all alone in your office.  What - that's just me.

You finally settle back down in your chair and click the wonderful "View Image" button and this is what you see:

New York State Archives Version

Source Citation:  New York State Archives; Albany, New York; State Population Census Schedules, 1915; Election District: 01; Assembly District: 01; City: Oswego Ward 02; County: Oswego; Page: 02 (as found on Ancestry.com. New York, State Census, 1915 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012). 

Oh no, it's faded and hard to read in spots.  You can't make out all the details and those could be very important.  Well, I guess that's that, right?

Not quite.  After spending a little time learning more about census records, I learned that typically census records were copied and in this case for a State census, a copy would be sent to the State government and the original would be kept at the county level.  For Federal censuses, three copies were often made, one for the State, one for the Federal and the original remained locally.

So, there was potentially another copy of this census floating around.  Great!  After some more digging online I discovered there was an Oswego County Records Center with copies of the 1915 state census.  So, off I went to see if their version was any better and luckily this is what they had:

Oswego County Records Center Version

Source Citation:  Oswego County Records Center; Oswego, New York; State Population Census Schedules, 1915; Election District: 01; Assembly District: 01; City: Oswego Ward 02; County: Oswego; Page: 94.

Much better.  Although the writing can be difficult to read in either case, at least the writing is dark enough to be seen here.  You can actually tell that this is a different handwritten copy based on the alignment of several items in the last column but the information is the same - just a little more legible in most cases.

So, I guess there are a couple of morals to this story - 1)  Don't do your happy dance too soon and 2) If the record you find is not readable for some reason - don't be afraid to dig for duplicates.  There may be one out there just waiting to be found and it may be in a local archive or records center like this one was for me.

Good luck and happy digging.