Davie Co. 1850 Families

1850 Davie County NC Census Project

Please help me identify the families living in Davie County in 1850! This file contains a list of the heads of household in the 1850 census, together with their likely spouses. Using marriage bond records and other data, I am trying to identify the maiden names of wives in each family. Nancy Murphy has provided many names from records at the Davie County public library, but there are still some that I can't identify. Can you add information to this list?

Initially I used the transcription of the 1850 census available from the Forsyth County Genealogical Society for data entry, but have subsequently verified names and other information from microfilm of the original census records. I'm now adding continuations of the 1850 families as they appear in the 1860-1880 records. Thank you, Nancy Murphy and Everette Sain, for making these transcriptions available!

I have necessarily had to make some assumptions in creating this list, which of course may not be correct in all cases:

I am assuming that the oldest female in a male-headed household is the wife of the head. It's possible in some cases that she is a daughter, sister or other relative, of course.
Where I have not yet found a marriage bond record, I have estimated the latest likely date of marriage from the ages of the oldest children. Where a bond record has been found, I've given the county and year.
When a marriage date is listed, but no wife or husband is present in the household, the assumption is that the head of household is a widow or widower who must have married by the given date in order to be the parent of the listed children. In some cases I have made a tentative identification of the deceased spouse.
Spelling on census records and marriage bonds is often idiosyncratic and inconsistent. I have used standard or traditional spellings here for most given names (e.g. Louisa rather than Loueza). Where spelling of a surname varies, I have used the currently most prevalent form (e.g. KURFEES rather than KERFOOSE).

You may find that the tables look better if you set the font on your web browser to Times 10 point.

The names are arranged alphabetically: