The 1880 census was Soundexed only for households having children under the age of 10. (These children were the first to become eligible for old-age benefits in 1935.) This does not mean that other households were not enumerated. It does mean that if your ancestor was not in a household with children under the age of 10, he or she will not be on the Soundex indexes, but will be in the census itself.
Those 1880 Children Retiring
With the passing of the Social Security Act in 1935, the government had to determine who was eligible for benefits. Those eligible needed to prove their ages. If they had no birth record, they could help substantiate the birth by a census record. The government, realizing that the first group of applicants was born before there was statewide registration of births, needed an efficient way to locate individuals on the census for verification of the birth. The only ones in the household that were important to the government in this initial Soundex were those who were under 10 in 1880. It was that group who would be applying for Social Security.
Learning the Soundex System
Applying the Soundex code to the surnames on your list before you go to the repository will speed up your census research when you get there. The table below explains the code. The letters A, E, I, O, U, W, Y, and H are disregarded. To apply the Soundex to your surnames, follow these steps: If the surname has fewer than three letters left, assign zeros to those places. Further refinements include the following:
Double letters are treated as one and coded with one number; thus 2 Ls will be 4, not 44.Two or more letters with the same code number that appear in sequence in a surname are assigned one number; thus CK in Dickson is coded as 2, not 22, and Szalay is S400. Two consonants with the same code number separated by a vowel are both coded; thus Svoboda is coded S123, not S103.A name that yields no letters is assigned 3 zeros, thus Chu becomes C000.Code names with prefixes, such as Van, Von, De, Le, with and without the prefix. You may find it either way in the Soundex.When two consonants with the same code number are separated by either an H or W, only the first is coded with the second being ignored; thus Burroughs is coded B622, not B620.
Examples using these rules are shown in the table below:
