Hi everyone, I have this address from a Milwaukee cemetery, the person is maybe my gggfather. If I read it right it's "3511, 37th street"(No. means North? Or number?) I wanted to verify this by finding this address in a 1930 census (he died in 1934). I'm not from US and I'm really struggling to understand the US street system and how the collection of that census was performed.
I found this website to help me narrow the results
https://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html?year=1930
so I put there the address and as suggested, I took a look on the Google Map to see which street crosses it. The closest is Keefe Ave so I set it as such. It gave me 2 results.
https://i.imgur.com/mEtT0dE.png
I went through both of them and nothing. Actually the house numbers on 37th street weren't even close to 3511 in those reports, they were around 1000 - 1500.
What am I doing wrong? How the street numbering works in the US? Also just out of curiosity - why weren't addresses indexed in Family Search?
Am I understanding right that you only have the address to look for? You don't know your gggfather's name? If you know his name it would be easier to search for that rather than trying to page through all of Milwaukee looking for his address.
Here's the tricky part: the street numbering system changed in Milwaukee during the period from 1929 to 1931. Bad timing for the census, for sure. If you're looking at a document from a cemetery showing the individual's last residence, they would use the numbering system that existed at the time of the document's creation, which is not the same as the numbering that existed in 1928. Today 3511 North 37th street still exists, and it's between Nash and Keefe streets. This shows the changes in street numbering that took place over that two year span. What ended up as 3501 used to be 1540. So that's why your addresses in the censuses you looked at were closer to 1500. I don't know exactly what number 3511 will translate to, but it's going to be something greater than 1540, probably not very much higher than that. In modern-day Milwaukee there's only one building between 3501 (which we know was 1540 in the census) and 3511. If you find 1540, the house you're looking for is probably just two entries after that one.
Oh, just in case they don't do this in your country, I should note something: when you're walking down a street in the US, the buildings on one side of the street will have even numbered addresses and the buildings on the other side will have odd numbered addresses. So if you see odd numbered addresses on the census, those will be on the wrong side of the road and you'll know they are not the one you're looking for.
Ah, no I have much more info, I just didn't want to overblown the post but I guess I just caused confusion. The fact is my search of gggfather goes for years. Months ago I created a thread on Reddit also, link
The long story short is: I know my gggfather 1930 census record, he lived on 7th street with his sister, link
And we found someone who died in 1934 and it could be him, several sources point this way. The address I posted is from this cemetery record, 2nd from the top on the right side link
So I had this idea - I could check this "3511, 37th street" address from the cemetery and there are 2 options
Ahhhhhh ☹️ I heard about some street naming change but I didn't know it's that bad. Thank you for the explanation, I'll go through the records again