Story County, Iowa 1895 Census

The census has been abstracted from microfilm. Because the original census book has a tight binding, some fields in the center of the page are lost or only partly visable. Of particular frustration is the "occupation" field for which only the end of the field is visible. Often one may assume that "?mer" is farmer, but of course that may not be true. Also the fields for whether the parents are foreign or native are not visable on most pages. For a complete description of the 1895 census, read the instructions to the assessors for completing the census.

The 1895 census is as of January 1, 1895. The ages given are "as of" that person's birthday in 1894. If born in 1894, the age was supposed to be recorded as "0". (One census taker recorded "B" rather than "0.") This means that if the age was correctly recorded, you can easily determine the year of birth by subtracting the age from 1894.

People who died in 1894 are also included in the census. I have indicated them in the Occupation field by "Died in 1884" or "Born & Died in 1894."

Abbreviations used in the census column headers:

• m/s/d/w Marital Status
• Page-Dw-Fam Page-Dwelling Number-Family Number
• CW Co: Reg: Civil War Company and regiment followed by State, Arm of Service and sometimes Rank (listed under Name as War Experience)
• MW: Mexican War regiment and state

Special characters used in data:

• NA Not Available. Used where the census taker should have recorded data but clearly left the field empty.
• ? Unreadable or uncertain. Used where information is unreadable in part or all of a field of data. This may be due to the field being cut off due to the tight binding of the census book, or because the information was too faint to read, or because the handwriting was hard to decipher.

In performing this abstraction, data was omitted for the following fields:

• Father native/foreign
• Mother native/foreign (not a visable field)
• Whether subject to military duty
• Whether eligible to vote
• Whether can read but not write
• Whether cannot read or write
• Children over 6 and under 17 not attending school
• Whether foreigner not naturalized
• Births in 1894
• Deaths in 1894
• Deaf and dumb not in State School for deaf
• Blind not in State College for Blind
• Insane not in State Hospital for Insane