Sometimes census records can be useful for more than just providing information about individual people. They can also show patterns of movement from one place to another, and give us clues about possible relationships. For example, if two families consistently move from place to place together (showing up on census record after census record in close proximity to one another, despite geographical movement), one can assume that there is some kind of connection between the two. Knowing there is a connection doesn’t tell us what the connection is, but it gives us a reason to try and find that out.

George T. Copeland, the father of Tom Copeland (who is, in turn, the father of many of our recent ancestors) is an enigma. I, along with several others, have been trying to figure out who he was for a long time. He left scant records, which makes our task difficult. One of the ideas I had recently was to create a database of all the Copelands living in areas where George might have lived. To do this I used Ancestry.com, did a Soundex search for “Copeland”, and requested the name of a particular location as a keyword (checking the box marked “exact”) — for example, my keyword for this search was “Dunklin.” Then I went to each census year and copied the entries (exactly as they were transcribed) into a spreadsheet. I’ve reproduced my spreadsheet here (leaving out a few miscellaneous catergories), with known ancestors highlighted in yellow.

As you can see, our George T. Copeland (sometimes called “G.T.” and here called “Thomas”) was the first Copeland to arrive on the scene in Dunklin, sometime before 1870. As the decades pass, more Copelands arrive. Some also leave. Some even come back (our Tom and family moved to Arkansas for many years and then came back to Dunklin County in the mid-1930s). The individuals that are not highlighted are all “persons of interest” to the genealogist. Yes, there are some similarities between CSI and genealogy — don’t laugh! While I haven’t yet made any definitive connections, I have been working on figuring out who all of those other Copelands are, where they came from, and where they went if they left Dunklin County. Some of these trails are undoubtedly dead ends but maybe one of them isn’t. Besides, who doesn’t love the thrill of the chase? 😉