Wading through the town of Western in the 1800
U.S. census of Oneida County, New York, I was totally confused by the layout of
the pages. Each page had three page numbers that seemed to hold no relationship
to one another. And at the middle of each page, the names jumped out of
alphabetical order. Or even jumped to a new
town! This was very confusing.
Then I began to suspect that the schedules for several towns had originally been bound together in "saddle-stitch"
fashion. It was as though the wind had blown the newspaper off
my porch and I had to pick up the pages and reassemble them in the
proper order.
Examining the images on NARA
microfilm roll M32-23, I picked out 23 consecutive pages laid out this same
way. I decided the enumerator, Bill Smith, took 12 sheets of paper (with page numbers 206 through
217 printed in the bottom-right corners), folded them in half and stitched the
papers together along the fold (the red line in the diagram to
the left). I will call these 12 sheets of paper "physical pages" and
the printed page numbers (not the hand-written page numbers) I will call physical page numbers. I
suspect when the National Archives went to microfilm the records, they unstitched the physical pages
to make the photography task easier. Someone added a cursive town label to the bottom
half of each physical page and wrote page numbers in the
top and bottom corners, so that the structure of the booklet could be inferred or
even reassembled.
So that is what I did—electronically reassembled the
page halves as in the properly assembled booklet. I was pleased to find that the
resulting booklet is consistent in every way. The towns in the booklet are Rome,
Western, Camden, Redfield, Mexico, Remsen and Steuben. The pages for each town
all occur together, with
names in alphabetical order (with few exceptions) and correct subtotals carrying from page to
page. I found the National Archives photographed the physical pages of the booklet
starting with the front of physical page number 206 (pp. 224-225), then the
back of physical page 206 (pp. 226, 223), then front and back of
physical page 207, and continuing in like manner until the last physical page,
number 217.
When I scanned these images, I used a film scanner that cropped the
right-most column (number of slaves) of each page, which unfortunately is where
the page numbers appeared. Should you wish to see the entire, original image, view the NARA
microfilm roll M32-23 or view the images on a commerical service such as Ancestry.com. Remember the Ancestry images are not
corrected for the saddle-stitching. But with a little care you could print the
front and back of each of the 12 physical pages from the Ancestry images and
staple them into booklet form. The twelveth sheet of paper should not be
bound like the rest. Perhaps the enumerator left this page unbound so that
the column titles could be laid alongside the columns on other pages.
I have been asked in the past how to print pages in my web-books that are too wide for an 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper.
I don't think that will be a concern in this web-page. But if it is, I leave
it to the reader to figure that out for themselves. Sometimes changing Orientation or margins in
the Page Setup is sufficient.
Examining the images on NARA
microfilm roll M32-23, I picked out 23 consecutive pages laid out this same
way. I decided the enumerator, Bill Smith, took 12 sheets of paper (with page numbers 206 through
217 printed in the bottom-right corners), folded them in half and stitched the
papers together along the fold (the red line in the diagram to
the left). I will call these 12 sheets of paper "physical pages" and
the printed page numbers (not the hand-written page numbers) I will call physical page numbers. I
suspect when the National Archives went to microfilm the records, they unstitched the physical pages
to make the photography task easier. Someone added a cursive town label to the bottom
half of each physical page and wrote page numbers in the
top and bottom corners, so that the structure of the booklet could be inferred or
even reassembled. 