Ancestry is a pain but thankfully there are other sources if you look hard enough

I have transcripts of a few censuses and no images of them. Among which was the 1930 US census for Harper H. Graham and family.

I know Ancestry has the image but they wont let me see it for free. So after much internet searching I found a site: https://archive.org/

I looked under the below link after clicking around (though there may be a better way to find census records through the search then using the below link)


https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22U.S.+Census+Bureau%22



Which has microfilm images for many things including census records. The catch being that they are divided into chunks by state and county and are listed in a random order. So you really have to know which county and which Enumeration District you're looking for ahead of time and have lots of time to sift through pages of titles before you find the chunk of images you want. Then you go page by page to try and find the page you want.

I got lucky and found the 1930 US Census page for Harper Graham and family.

Now the transcript I had already - had put Harper's name down as Arther which is obviously wrong.

However I now understand why that is, as the image has 'Graham, Arther H.' written clear as day on the page. As his wife Emma and two children Curtis and Helen(my grandmother) are there and everything else is correct or near enough to be correct, I must assume that someone misheard the name "Harper' as 'Arther' or something because no where else has Harper's name been spelled wrong nor has he ever gone by any name other than Harper or H. H. Graham.

Harper and his family are lines 18 - 21 and at the time Harper was a Pumper in the Oil Fields.
In 1940 he'd be a Roustabout for the same or a similar company. He worked for Blackwell Oil but in 1930 it seems to have worked for Gilmore Gasoline Plant Number 10 (I don't know if Blackwell owned Gilmore or if they were separate companies. Blackwell Oil is listed right after Gilmore in the census).

I saved several pages of the Oil Field workers from this census but then my mouse slipped and lost my place so I didn't get them all. I may put them up somewhere if there is interest in them.

I should look up stuff about the oil fields in Oklahoma sometime soon to get a better idea of what Harper did for a living.

About Time!

While digging around in the GRAHAMs I naturally ended up in the NANCEs as the two are quite interlinked through marriage and such. So I was looking up things to confirm bits I had and maybe get some new info on certain key relations - namely I was looking for a death certificate for Elizabeth (Nance) Griffin half-sister of Greeley and William Graham.

Well I didn't find what I wanted, but I did find three separate online obituaries for Elizabeth's daughter Mary Elizabeth (Griffin) Peloquin who died April 19, 2005 at age 95. She died in California and had an obit in two of my local newspapers (those things that occasionally land on your driveway between dawn and dusk if you remembered to pay the random children they send to the door every so often). Well according to the obituaries Mary Elizabeth (Griffin) Peloquin was a elementary school teacher in California not too far from myself in the same state.

Also she had a Catholic funeral service and burial which makes her the first Catholic blood relative I've found so far in my family. I'm surprised I haven't found any before but the Bradfords have been Baptists since time began just about and the Millers were Anabaptists, then Mennonites and Amish(the two intermixed or were confused for each other from what I've seen written by other relatives) before some of their descendants (namely my direct line) switched over to being Methodists and then Presbyterians.

Not much to say just an interesting find for me.

Edit: 

I have since ordered and received the death certificate of Elizabeth (Nance) Griffin. It did not give a name for her mother as I'd hoped it would but it did confirm the year I had for her birth, and date of her death, and give a reason for her death - Typhoid (which I already had been told beforehand by a distant cousin on a genealogy forum - I don't recall exactly which one at this time). A lot of information  - parents' names and place of birth, informant, day and month of birth, place of burial and undertaker's name were all left blank.