Transcribed by Michael Caldwell.
Notes:
Entries are separated by commas, as follows:
Name, Age, Occupation, Value of Real Estate owned, Place of Birth
Surnames of families or individuals are in CAPITALS for ease of scanning.
Place of birth is Pennsylvania unless indicated otherwise.
Children under the age of one year are indicated by a fraction of months, such as 6/12. The census was taken in October, 1850. This will help researchers to determine a month of birth for the child in question.
If a given name is indistinct but the sex of the person is clear, or if it not evident that the given name belongs to a particular sex, the age of the person in question will be followed by M or F.
For ease of typing, I am not including a dollar sign ($) with the Value of Real Estate owned entries.
There were 495 families in Fairfield township, some of which were apparently boarding houses occupied by a number of, say, Railroad workers. I have given the families in the same order as visited by the census enumerator, James P. Hurst. Families are separated by one blank line. In the case of more than one family in the same household, take note of the following example:
Samuel BEST, 21, Cooper
Louisa, 18
Jacob GARLAND, 22, Cooper
Elizabeth, 20
Mary E., 1
Samuel & Louisa are BESTs and Jacob, Elizabeth, and Mary E. are GARLANDs. This format will be followed throughout.
Although I did not change any of the data on the original microfilm, I did add, in brackets following a family's entry, cemetery records I found that seemed to correspond with a particular family. These of course are not found on the original census, but I thought might make a useful addition to this web site. There are only four cemeteries cited and there are several more that I have not yet transcribed. Upcoming will be Bolivar's West View Cemetery, the Fort Palmer Cemetery, and the cemetery at the site of the former Camp Fairfield.
Legibility of this enumeration is fairly good. Unclear names will be followed by an asterisk, thus: *
Contributed by Michael Caldwell for use by the Westmoreland County Genealogy Project (http://www.pa-roots.com/westmoreland/)
Westmoreland County Genealogy Project Notice:These electronic pages cannot be reproduced in any format, for any presentation, without prior written permission.
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