Interesting catch in the census
If you’ve ever done family history you know that you’re going to be looking at census records for hours! I’ve never payed much attention to the names of the people that actually did the census-taking. Yesterday I happened to look at the enumerators’ names. The enumerators for Fremont in 1920 were Leah E. McCarty and Kathryne S. VanderWerp. Interesting!
Leah McCarty was married to Henry McCarty, a prominent democrat in Fremont. I think that Kathryne is Don VanderWerp’s mother.*** Don was a prominent republican in town and would later become a state representative and senator. He was also editor of the Times Indicator when it still published regular editorials so I have a lot of material on him, not much that’s very flattering (from my perspective at least, he was very far to the right).
It would be interesting to catalogue the other enumerators and see how many were politically connected.
***Correction (two minutes after posting this, haha): After searching FADL’s Local History Database I now think that Kathryne is more likely to be Don’s sister-in-law. Edward VanderWerp’s (Don’s brother) obituary in the database says he was married to Katherine Slayton. She would have been around 40 years old in 1920. The elder Kathryne (Katherine? Catherine? who knows) would have been over 60.
Don VanderWerp was also, of course, a member of the Klan.
ncm said this on April 10, 2009 at 8:44 am