The census pages of the Van
Buren Township of Brown County have been rearranged to reflect the original
sequence of the pages. Apparently, when the census pages were being copied, the
unnumbered and undated pages were lying in a stack on a table when a breeze
coming through an open window blew the pages onto the floor into disarray. This
would have been a small matter if the dwellings and households had been
numbered sequentially. However,
this was not the case. Each page
started with dwelling one and household one. Since the surname of each family was written only once, this
meant that children at the top of the next page were “orphaned” without a
surname and appeared to belong to the family at the bottom of the previous
page, which may or may not have been the case. Using a variety of source materials, the order of the pages
of the census of Van Buren Township has been modified to reflect a more
appropriate sequence. This book contains an every name index which includes the
given name and the age of each individual.