The 1950 census, Forreston, Illionois

I recently received a notice from Family Search about the 1950 U.S. census. So, I looked at my mother, p. 27--interesting to see the details from 1950--names of our neighbors, their kids, professions etc. I remember so many of these people. I didn't know our street had a name! However, my brother and I weren't on the list (we were 10 and 8), so I moved to the next page. No, we weren't there. Then I went backwards and there we were on p. 26 not attached to a family (at least not that I could discern). Maybe the paging goes down instead of up?  I also noticed that in 1950 49.51% of women over 14 were married, so I checked for current data, and found that in 2022 49.9% of women over 15 are married. When I looked at the 1920 census for my grandfather, I see that young children (under 3 or 4) also were listed with months.  My aunt Muriel was 2 and 11 months. That wasn't done for older children.

Aunt Leta and Uncle Ben

I can't recall when I signed up for Family Search, the huge Mormon data base of genealogy, but every now and then I get an interesting e-mail alerting me that there's new information in my family tree. Lask week it was the marriage certificate of my Aunt Leta and Uncle Ben. She was my grandmother's sister, and he was my grandfather's cousin. She lived in Illinois and he lived in Tennessee, but for some reason (I never heard a family story about it) they were married in Henerson Kentucky.  In my memory, they were always "old," but I was surprised to see they didn't get married until 1940, Ben was 46 and Leta was 34. Leta's baby sister, Ada, who would have been about 26, was one of the witnesses. They had no children, but Ben had a son Gene from a first marriage who was mentally challenged. Gene died in 1999 having lived many years in a care facility, and by then there was almost no one to look after the final arrangements and burial. Except my dad who was in his 80s. He made the arrangements and went to the cemetery with a few other distant cousins in the cold and snow to pay respects, because that's what families do. I think he got pneumonia. You just never know what old memories will show up in your e-mail.