After reading   My Grandfather was an Enumerator on the blog ABT UNK, I decided to write something about my grandmother Fannie M. Turner who was  an enumerator for the 1910 US Census in Montgomery, Alabama.  She was 22 and lived with her mother and younger sisters in Montgomery, although not in the district she enumerated.  Her grandmother Eliza Allen lived in the district. It was looking at the entry for Eliza that I first noticed that my grandmother was the enumerator.  Recently I found a newspaper article online about the appointed census takers that said in part:

“Montgomery – City – Whites: Albert S. Ashley,  E.F. Davis, James C. Westbrook, Leopold Loab, Thomas Robinson, R. Brownlee Centerfit, Charles S. Spann, Louis Lyons, Edgar W. Smith, Mrs. Fannie B. Wilson, Handy H. McLemore, Thomas M. Westcott, Alto Deal, Miss Gene Finch, Frank G. Browder. Negroes–To enumerate negro (sic) population only–Gertrude V. Wilson, Eli W. Buchanan, Fannie M. Turner, David R. Dorsey.”

Fannie M. Turner began work April 15, 1910 and enumerated her Aunt Abbie and her Grandmother Eliza on pg 2. She finished on April 26.  Mrs. Fannie B. Wilson (white) completed the enumeration of Montgomery, Ward 4 by counting the white residents on several pages after that.  As noted in the newspaper article, Negro enumerators could only count Negros.  I wonder how that worked. Did my grandmother go to the door, note that they were white and tell them someone else would return to count them later? Did the neighbors alert her?  Since she was already familiar with the neighborhood, did she already know where the white people lived or did all the white residences live in the same area?

My grandmother was a working woman who managed her Uncle Victor’s grocery store from the time she graduated from State Normal School until she married my grandfather in 1919.  Wish I knew the stories she must have had to tell about that two weeks of counting the citizens in Ward 4.