It is very common when recording your ancestors from census records to encounter an additional mystery person as part of the household. Quite often this extra person is described as being a “labourer”, a “domestic”, or may not have any indication of their relationship with the family at all. Are they significant? Are they related in any way?
I recently came across such a family and wanted to demonstrate the importance and value of researching these additional people in a household. This particular example comes from the 1871 Canadian Census and includes James Cox (age 61), his wife Mary (nee Logan) (age 44), and their children: William (age 21), Mary (age 20), Frances (age 18), Thomas (age 17), Euphemia (age 14) and the mystery person, Henry Dennis (age 16) who is listed as a “Labourer”. This would indicate that the family had this young man working for them on their farm which was very common at that time. There is no indication that he is related in any way. Many of us would record the immediate family and move on.
It has been a standard practice of mine when recording individuals from a census into my genealogy software to make note of anyone not initially identified as being related to the head of household. I use Family Tree Maker 2019 and to do this, I simply go to my source citation, click on Note and enter a brief note indicating the name, age, and birth location of the individuals I cannot place in my family tree at that time.
Additionally, I keep a running list of these individuals in a separate index sorted by surname. Once in a while I review this list to see if my tree has gown to include anyone with those surnames and then I compare to see if they may fit into any of the existing families. In this particular case, I got a match while researching the sister of James Cox, Margaret. As it turns out, Henry Dennis (b. 1854) was the son of Henry Dennis (1812-1857) and his wife Margaret Cox (1818-1857). Henry was the youngest of 7 children born to Henry and Margaret and would have been only 3 years old when both of his parents died in 1857.
Since their death was prior to civil registration, I haven’t yet been able to confirm the nature of their deaths but this tragedy would have left their children stranded. It seems that Henry was then placed with his Uncle (James) and his family and was eventually adopted. My next steps will be to trace the other 6 children of various ages ranging from 3 to 18 at the time of their parent’s deaths. I would predict that I will likely find them with other family members or living with other households listed in a similar manner as Henry Dennis. Isn’t that the fun part of genealogy though? Solving mysteries?
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