A 90-60 Census Workbook Case Study: Mystery of the Hanna Men

Why were young men named Hanna starting to show up in multiple households of the sons of James Crook, the hub person of my current genohistory project? Getting an answer meant facing the PIP censuses, but with the 90-60, bring them on.

This article is extracted and revised from my longer version published in AGS Magazine (the biannual publication of the Alabama Genealogical Society), Spring 2023, as “The 90-60 Census Workbook: A Hanna-Crook Case Study.” Reprinted with permission of the AGS.

I made the case in my last post that we do not need to be intimidated by the PIP (partially identified persons) censuses. In fact, squeezing answers from these censuses can be an exhilarating game, valuable to our own research and to everyone who will borrow from it. I encouraged you to consider a tool like my 90-60 Census Workbook, called the “90-60.” In this post, I want to show you how the 90-60 helped me solve a mystery in my current genohistory project. I will begin by describing what the 90-60 does.

What Does the 90-60 Do?

The 90-60 Census Workbook is a Google Sheets template to collect, align, arrange, and analyze U.S. federal census data between 1790 and 1860. And the keyword is “align.” Answers come when you compare census data from one decade to the next, aligned on the one thing that is consistent: the birth year.

The 90-60 allows you to rearrange census data in as many ways as you need to assist your analysis. Sometimes you need to see census information in reverse order by census year. Sometimes you want to group all the people with the same name in a given county at a certain time. You might want to group people by their given names in a sheet dedicated to a surname. You might want to group by decade. The question you want to answer determines how you need to see the data.

The Brick Wall of Westward Migration

Those who study families in newly opened territories of the antebellum U.S. often hit on a common problem. They faced an influx of the young sons and daughters of settlers of the original colonies. They arrived as the native groups were expelled, eager to take up the inexpensive federal lands. The brick wall often comes in trying to determine who their parents were.

Many of them arrived in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. They were often in their twenties. Therefore, the last time a census taker recorded their existence, they were just an unnamed tally in someone else’s household. If you have their location in 1850, you can retrieve their state of birth. Armed only with that, you need to pick their parents from a PIP census. These named only the head of the household and put tally numbers into columns, often with no headings. Even if they have a very unusual surname, chances are that several related families share the surname in the area. More often than not, though, the surname is common enough to create for you a real needle-in-a-haystack dilemma. You might find thirty households in the young person’s home state with the same surname. How do you find THE ONE?

The 90-60 allows you to collect PIP census data in a much more usable format, and you can start knocking out the prospects who do not fit, using every clue available to you. You narrow the field to a workable number of households, and you start building trees. 

Discovering the Hannas and Crooks—A Genohistorical Project

I am working on a genohistory of early Calhoun County, Alabama, back when it was called Benton County. I moved here in 2020, and I want to know my new home in all its ancestral layers. Few of my ancestors lived here, and none were here for life. Genohistory is a history “on the ground,” using the experiences of interconnected real people. I knew I was going to have to find someone else’s family to be the initial hub or “eyes” through which I viewed this time and place. One day I noticed the surname “Crook” attached to a house that still stands in Jacksonville—a place locals call “Ten Oaks” and a historical marker touts as “Beauregard’s Headquarters.”

James Crook, the owner of Ten Oaks, was ideal as the genesis for my genohistory project for several reasons. Most importantly, he was a slaveowner, so I knew that studying this family would illuminate the world of slaveholders, the enslaved, overseers, neighbors, poor relatives, business associates, politicians, and many others. By extension through a slaveholding family, I could learn so much about so many.

Second, this house stands ten minutes from my new home at old Fort McClellan in Anniston, and the Benton County records are ten minutes in the other direction. I’ve longed for a research project so close to home that I could take my time in archives, rather than arranging expensive research trips and trying to grab anything I could get before the long drive home. I will finally get to do immersion research.

Finally, I chose this family as my project hub because of the surname. My husband and I have a dear friend, not far from here in Georgia, with the rather unusual last name of Crook. With some rapid research, we confirmed that his people share a common ancestor with the Calhoun County Crooks. 

So I had my first family. I knew the project would soon be many families as I worked outward from this core. My Calhoun County Genohistory Project family tree has James S. Crook III as its home person.

The Hanna Men

While working through James’s children as they went out on their own in the 1850 census, I noticed a peculiar pattern. His son William Pinkney Crook had in his household a young family living with him: M. M. Hanna, his wife Susan, and their two young children, John and Eliza. Then oddly, I noticed that next in the census, the household of James’s son Samuel Wilds Crook included another Hanna male, R.C., listed as an overseer. Then, nearby in the census, I found James’s son Wily Williams Crook housing another Hanna named J.W. All three of what I’ll call the “Hanna Men” were born in South Carolina and were in their 20s.

There were a few other Hanna surnames in the 1850 Benton County census but no readily apparent connection to the Hanna Men. I could hypothesize with fair confidence that the three were related to each other and likely related to the Crooks. Carrying the census research forward in time, I was able to put full names and more accurate ages on the three.

Mansel Monroe Hanna (1821–1864) married Susan Brittain, a Tennessee native, in Benton County 10 Dec 1846. So he had relocated sometime before that. Finding Susan’s family story was even more complicated than her husband’s, so it will have to wait for another day. Mansel served in Joe Wheeler’s escort during the Civil War and died in a Confederate hospital in Georgia at age 43. Susan’s fate after that is still under investigation, though her children appear in later records.

Jesse Williams Hanna (1826–1863) purchased land and bought at least three enslaved persons before the Civil War. He died intestate at age 37 and never married. His estate was handled by someone named William F. Hanna, who declared in 1868 that Jesse had the following heirs: R. C Hanna, the widow and children of M. M. Hanna, and a “Mrs. Gay.” 

Robert Cunningham Hanna (1828–1882) married Lucy J. Martin, had five children, and lived out his life in Calhoun County. 

Hypotheses of the Hanna Men

At this point, I was operating with these hypotheses about the Hanna Men:

1. They are most likely brothers.
2. James S. Crook originated in Spartanburg, South Carolina, so the Hanna Men most likely came from there.
3. They were probably living with their parent(s) in South Carolina in 1840.
4. They might have had a sister who married someone with the surname Gay.

But I also knew that the previous census likely would not have named them. Being unmarried teenagers, they were not likely to have been the heads of households. No Hanna households appear in Benton County, Alabama, in 1840. The Hanna Men might have come to Benton County directly from their home state of South Carolina, or they might have lived in other places between birth and their arrival in Alabama.

So, how could I find their parents? 

Finding the Parents of the Hanna Men with the 90-60

I decided to start my search in South Carolina. Only if that failed would I search Tennessee, Georgia, and other Alabama locations. An index search for surnames Hanna, Hannah, and Hanner in 1840 South Carolina brought up 23 households, and I knew that a line-by-line review of censuses would bring up more. 

To start with the most likely Hannas, I targeted the county of Spartanburg. Searching every line of the 1840 Spartanburg census, I found three Hanna households—all spelled “Hanner” by the census taker, thanks to the way the name would have been pronounced there. This was a manageable bunch for me, and I was ready to analyze with the 90-60.

Using the 90-60 Census Workbook

I created a 90-60 workbook for the Hannas and other connected families. Suspecting the Hanna Men were brothers, I began by establishing a pseudo-household for the three men, flagging their ages as recorded in the 1850 Benton County census. The 90-60 layers a person’s census records so that their tally always falls in the same range of birthyear columns, no matter the decade. By setting the 1850 Hanna Men into a household, I established a baseline of comparison. This line tells me where I should expect to see tallies for them in the 1840 records. Below them, I placed the three “Hanner” families that were recorded in the 1840 U.S. census in Spartanburg, South Carolina, so that I could scan for a similar pattern in the birth years of each household’s young men.

This immediately eliminated Rob’t Hanner as the household of origin. In 1840 he had no male children of the right age. “Cath’e Hanner” is a possibility, since R.C. at age 14 was right on the cusp of the next age category. Clearly, though, the likeliest household belonged to “Geo. Hanner,” as he had sons exactly where we hoped to see them. George Hanna’s family was therefore the logical next step in my research. 

Evaluating the George Hanna Family

The first test of the George Hanna hypothesis required a look forward to the 1850 census. Had three sons of the right age departed George’s household by 1850, perhaps going south to Benton County, Alabama? I added an 1850 census line in the 90-60 to see the layout of George’s family. Three of his sons of the right age from the 1840 census were no longer in the household, so this looked even more promising and worth some deep work.

I created a tree for George Hanna and began to trace the fates of his children. The three older sons of George Hanna, who had disappeared from his 1850 household are named John Pinkney, Robert Patilla, and James Cunningham—not our Hanna Men. They did not move to Alabama. A younger son, William Franklin Hanna (1837–1915), was in his father’s 1850 household but did eventually move to Benton County. There, he married in 1859 and handled the estate of Hanna Man Jesse Williams Hanna after his death in 1863. This strengthens the hypothesis that the Hanna Men came from Spartanburg, as does the recurring middle name Cunningham.

So, while George Hanna was likely related to the Hanna Men, he did not father them. This left only Cath’e (Catherine) Hanna as a prospect in Spartanburg in 1840.

Evaluating Catherine Hanna

Catherine Hanna appears as the head of household in 1840 with three teenage sons and a daughter, aged between 5 and 9. I now needed to find out which Hanna household Catherine and her children inhabited in 1830, in hopes of finding her husband’s name.

I added a worksheet to my Hanna 90-60 and copied Catherine’s 1840 information into the top two lines as my baseline. Then I put in an entry for every Hanna head of household living in Spartanburg County in 1830 to see if we have matches with her 1840 household. Though it seems like a lot of work to record every household, it becomes a ready reference as inevitable questions arise in the future. Most of the households will eventually show up as related to Catherine’s husband.

Catherine is the “1” on the top census record under the “White Females <50.” I scanned down the 1830 Hanna households for a woman in the same column. There were only two options. John or William Hanna had a wife of the correct age.

So we now only have two households to evaluate for the sons. William has only one son, so we can eliminate him. John Hanna, with three sons, is the likely husband of Catherine. If the Hanna men are brothers and came to Benton County from Spartanburg, this is almost certainly their family.

Catherine disappears from censuses after 1840. Perhaps her death spurred the departure of her sons for new opportunities.

The Fate of Catherine’s Daughter

Catherine’s daughter was born between 1831 and 1835. She might have married a man with the surname Gay. This would make her likely the final heir mentioned in the will of Jesse Hanna. She might have stayed in Spartanburg or followed her brothers to Benton County. Or, she went somewhere else, in which case I would have another needle in a haystack to pursue. 

I searched for marriages between a Hanna female and a male surnamed Gay. I found the marriage of Eliza R. Hannah to Newton Gay in Benton County, Alabama, 11 Oct 1854. The 1860 Census for Benton/Calhoun’s neighboring county, Cherokee, lists Rebecca E. Gay with a birth year of 1832 and a birthplace of South Carolina, making her an ideal candidate.

Rebecca Eliza Hanna does not show up in the 1850 census for Benton County. If she is the daughter of Catherine Hanna, who appears to have died in the 1840s, she was likely with family members somewhere. The 1850 census for Spartanburg shows an “Elza Hanna” in the household of George Hanna (who further research and 90-60 analysis revealed to be the brother of the deceased John Hanna, likely father of the Hanna Men). The tallies for the 1840 census for George do not reflect this extra child, and she does not appear in South Carolina censuses after this. Though not proven by the evidence at hand, it is likely that Rebecca Eliza Hanna went to live with Uncle George after her mother died, waiting for her brothers to get established enough for her to relocate to Benton County.

How are the Crooks of Benton County Involved?

The Hanna Men did not randomly choose Benton County, Alabama, because they could buy cheap federal land, as was the story with so many. Something else made them choose Benton County. Each was housed with one of three Crook brothers, the sons of James S. Crook III. This would only happen if the Crook and Hanna families were very close. The recurrence of names like Cunningham, Williams, and Pinkney among the Crook sons, the Hanna Men, and George Hanna’s sons suggests they shared ancestors.

If the Crooks were family—close enough to take in three Hannas—Catherine seemed the likely connection. Could she be a Crook?

I searched for a South Carolina marriage record for John Hanna and Catherine Crook but found no official record. Online member trees mentioned the marriage of John Hanna to Catherine Crook, but conflicted on the year and the page number in an elusive source. At last a typescript surfaced in FamilySearch, compiled by descendants of James Crooks’ father, James Jr. and his wife Mary Williams. It confirmed from the family history that “Catherine Crook, married a Mr. Hanna.”

Without records of when and where John and Catherine Crook died, I remain uncertain of the series of events that brought the Hanna Men and their sister to Benton County. It does seem most likely that their mother’s brother, James S. Crook III, was finding great opportunities in this newly opened frontier and secured a stopping place for each of his nephews as they built their new lives after losing their parents. Within a few years, their sister reunited with them in the new area. Two of the three Hanna Men died during the Civil War. The remaining Hanna Man and his sister eventually parted ways, when Mrs. Newton Gay and her family joined the tide of Alabamians seeking new opportunities in Texas.

* * *

In this case, as in all of them, you will do substantial work beyond this to seal your conviction that you have the correct people. But the 90-60 helps you to isolate the viable prospects to create manageable research projects.

The 90-60 Census Workbook is available from my shop at Genohistory.com. The product description there has a link to a video that will walk you through the installation and use of the tool. The tool costs $29—a one-time charge that allows you unlimited use of it for your own private or professional use. You can create as many workbooks as you want and as many as 190 or so sheets within a single workbook, if your system memory allows. When you think of what an hour of your time is worth—the tool will have paid for itself in about an hour or two, with everything beyond that a bonus. It is going to save you time, frustration, and costly errors. And it’s fully refundable within 14 days, if you are not satisfied.

Please share this with friends who struggle with the PIP brick walls. Encourage them to get on my mailing list by scrolling to the bottom of the page. They’ll get a free Research Plan in the process! And please comment!

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