Lesson #2

Ivory’s adventures in census records, otherwise known as lesson #2.

I started off by looking up something I thought would be easy to locate, information on my great-grandfather Ray Rebarchek. One of the original 1935 colonists in Palmer, he wrote his own autobiography, and is easy to locate in the colony records. I have his birthdate, the information on the town and state he resided in before he moved to Alaska, and his spouse. Should be a cinch to locate his census data, or so I thought.
Turns out, I was wrong. Searching for ’Rebarchek, Raymond’ in the census data gets no results. Searching for ‘Rebarchek’ gets several results, but none for Raymond. Some of them are the right age range to be his father however, so I search for his father, ‘Rebarchek, Leonard’, using those results to see if I can find a Raymond listed as a child. I hit paydirt with ‘L.W. Rebarchek’, who has a son named Raymond listed in the 1910 census in Wisconsin (not a stretch, since Raymond was a Minnesota resident before he moved to Alaska).

I was curious about the lack of census records for Ray during the 1920 and 1930 census though. Asking my mother about it, she told me that sometime between 1920 and 1930, Ray drove a motorcycle over to the west coast to log trees with his brother, and that could explain why there is no census data for him during that period. Family history aside, it is interesting to note how many gaps there are in the official data, even during later census periods.

Speaking of lost data, the 1890 census gaps with the fire in Washington sparks some interesting questions of how much can be lost when we lose that information. These days, I don’t think there is as much to lose as there was when it was only one paper copy. With the internet, we live in a world of data redundancy, and things like cloud networks and filesharing mean that even if one copy is lost, as long as someone else had the information, you can start over. The danger is, of course, when there is only one copy of something (whether it is a physical copy or a digital one) there is always a possibility that you will lose it. But I do think that archivists and librarians are getting smarter about archiving things both digitally and physically. I think that often those actions are seen as a budget waste, since it takes twice as long to have physical and digital backups, but with important information, it is definitely worth it.

Looking at the first Alaska census in 1900, its interesting to see that there were only 3 areas listed. I wonder what the 1900 census in Alaska was like. It must have been extremely difficult to get information with communities so scattered.