Ancestral Gleanings from the Dinner Table

Thanksgiving is a great time to learn a little or a lot about one's relatives and ancestors. Unexpected things may pop up. I gleaned a fair bit from our Thanksgiving conversations, most of which I'll share after some further processing.

But one of the surprising bits was this: I asked my father if he recalled ever talking to a census taker. He replied, "I was a census taker."

In 1950, he answered a newspaper ad in Houston, Texas, to become an enumerator for that year's census. He was assigned to Houston's fifth ward (where he lived). He said it was hard work, involved a lot of walking. Most everybody was cooperative, including Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, who was awakened after just having gotten to sleep following a long night of work.