If you think that families change residences more often today than ever before, you may only be partially correct. While it is not uncommon for families to move quite a few times these days, you may not know that families also moved frequently during the 1800s and early 1900s. When I learned this, I was surprised. I tended to think of ancestors from that time period as fairly attached to one place, having a homestead and passing on the family place from generation to generation. While this may have been true for some families, it certainly was not the case for all families.
As industrialization in the United States and elsewhere happened at a rapid pace, families began to leave their farms and head to the cities in search of work and money. They even moved from city to city in search of better opportunities. Lest you think that these folks bought a home every time they moved, I also learned today that many city dwellers were renters, much as they are today. Another common trend among our ancestors from the 1800s and 1900s is that their moves were often associated with life events like birth of a child, being widowed, or getting divorced. Sometimes, part of the family would move to a city from the farm or from one city to another to get things started. The rest of the family would stay in the location where they were until the family members that had gone ahead to the next destination had gotten jobs and secured housing and other things that the family would need.
As interesting as all of this is, it could create quite a quandary when you are looking for your highly mobile ancestors in census records. You may see a household where there are a husband and wife and five children, only to discover that by the time of the next census, the wife and three children were still at that address with no mention of the husband or the other two kids. This does not mean that they suffered some horrible misfortune, although they could have. It may simply mean that you’ll have to look elsewhere to find them because they may have relocated. Our mobile ancestors may be a little hard to track down, but if you are able to discover the stories behind their frequent relocations, you will have some great family stories to tell about how they went from place to place in order to make things work for their family.