1880 Federal Census, Alameda County, California

Reprinted by permission. Copyright 2001 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
Material in this database is reprinted by permission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In granting permission for this use of copyrighted material, the Church does not imply endorsement or authorization of this web site.

The most massive data extraction effort ever undertaken by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) culminated on June 1, 2001 with the release of the 1880 U.S. Census database on compact disk. With 50.5 million names, it is a fully extracted record with every name indexed. As an indication of the magnitude of the effort, it required 11.5 million hours of labor by the extractors, spread over 17 years.

A tiny fraction of the database - that pertaining to the home locale of the Livermore-Amador Genealogical Society (L-AGS) - is presented on these Web pages as a handy reference for local historians and genealogists. Using the powerful search engine on the L-AGS home page allows researchers to find any name - in fact, any word - anywhere on the Web site. Any search will now include this 1880 census tabulation.

The full records as presented in the Church database are listed in the order written down by the census-taker. In all, 4370 names of residents are included. Each record contains a sequence number, the individual's full name, relationship to head of the house, age, gender, race, marital status, occupation, birthplace, and the birthplace of the individual's parents.

The head of each household is indicated by "Self" in the Relationship column. As an aid to the eye, the name of the head of the household is set one space to the left of the other names in the household. Not all residents in a household are family members, of course - many are farm workers, presumably living in bunkhouses. Individuals not related to the head of the household are indicated by "Other" in the Relationship column.

All information on these Web pages is printed exactly as offloaded from the LDS disks. The only exception is that the first and last names are permuted to last name first. The other information was not corrected, edited, abbreviated or changed in any way. No manual re-entering of data was done. Obvious errors can be noted, for example, different spellings of the surnames of children in the same family. There is no way to know, without researching the original handwritten schedules, whether these were caused during the enumeration or during the transcription.

The names of many exotic places, not known to exist on this earth, are recorded in the birthplace columns. One can only wonder where Shinway, Peek Pike, Wesmear, Barbavia and Sleishway really are. No key to place-name abbreviations was given by the enumerators or the transcribers.

Although the data items themselves were not changed, except as noted, the presentation format was radically altered to a compact form to improve readability.

Murray Township in 1880 encompassed all of Eastern Alameda County, including the towns of Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin and Sunol.

Note added 7 Dec 2005:
These files were originally created and added to the L-AGS Web site in 2001. They were derived from transcriptions made by the LDS Church and posted on the Web. On 6 Dec 2005 the transcriptions were compared to the original handwritten enumerations as posted by Ancestry.com. The comparison revealed that 8 records were missed by the transcribers. Also, the 2001 posting by L-AGS did not stop soon enough - 242 records belonging to Brooklyn Township, ED 28, were wrongly included. Adding the 8 missed records and deleting the 242 foreign records changes the total number of records in Murray Township from 4604 to 4370.

Source: FHL Film 1254062 National Archives Film T9-0062 Pages 549A to 596A

L-AGS File Structure

As a favor to those with slow modems, we have divided the 566 KB census file into ten parts. The best way to search for a name (or any word) in these 1880 census listings is to return to the L-AGS Home Page and click on the link "Search All L-AGS Web Pages". Enter the word in the search box. If the word is in the census tabulation, a link to one or more of the following files will be displayed:

When the file opens, either after using the search engine or after clicking on one of the links above, use the Find function of the browser to search for the word in the file.

If you have a fast modem, you may prefer to open the entire census at once. In that case, click on:

1880 Federal Census, Alameda County, California - Murray Township, Residents 1-4370 (Warning! 566 KB) (census1880.all.html)

To prevent duplication of hits, this large file is skipped over by the search engine.

To return to this page, use the Back button on the browser.