The 1915 Iowa State Census is available on FamilySearch. Unfortunately the microfilmed images are cards–one card per person.
It took a little bit to piece together the entry for the family of George A. and Catherine Freund in Davenport, Iowa.
There is an index to these cards and they are searchable by name, but they are also arranged within each county or larger city. They are not organized with any more geographical precision that city. Personally, if the residence of the person is known with enough precision that the county or city is known, I found it easier to simply view them that way instead of performing searches and constantly going back to the search results.
There was another Freund family in Davenport, separate families can be sorted out by the residence that is listed on each card. That’s how this family was separated out.
The cards are also numbered–which allowed me to infer the “head of household” and others “next in line” if the names had been written in a traditional census type ledger page format.
The cards for the Freunds living at 2008 Fulton Avenue, start with George A. Freund (card B692) and end with Agnes Freund (B697). One cannot search this database by card number, which would have been really helpful. The alphabetical structure of the cards strips the sense of neighborhood. We’ll have a little more discussion of these cards in an upcoming post.
Joanne Calvert says:
I, too, am confounded by the 1915 Iowa Census; the cards are also at ancestry.com. The families I am searching are in several counties. In Buchanan County, I found one mother at 179 and her young son at 174; where are the middle numbers of the other members of the family? I found another married daughter at 301 under her maiden name, her son under his father’s surname at 302, her father and mother are 299, 300 respectively, but where is the husband?
I wish that they would an alphabetical index, but leave the cards in numerical order.
mjnrootdig says:
They can be browsed in alphabetical order at FamilySearch. In my case, I went through all the Freunds in Scott County, Iowa, and copied the cards for the same address. Fortunately they all had the same last name and could easily be found. However, if they had a boarder or a relative living with them with a different last name I would not find that person unless I searched for that person specifically. The alphabetical nature of the cards facilitated finding a specific person, but it complicates the reconstruction of households.