The Chautauqua County Genealogical Society will meet today in the Steele Room of the Barker Library, 7 Day St., Fredonia. Norman Carlson will explain his uses of the 1850 census.

In his words: “Here’s the story. Doing Busti for Wayne’s 1850 census extraction I started making notes about things like difficult to read entries, points of disagreement between federal and county copies, easy to confuse names, etc. Somehow things kept expanding and expanding until now (after and apart from the census publication) I plan what I call a stub genealogy of most families in Busti in 1850 – at least trying to say something helpful and maybe unique for the benefit of the family history researcher.

“I am especially trying to make note of marriages and connections WITHIN that census and to a lesser extent similar family connections into other towns and into Warren County where I can – an immense task really. Plus when I can I want to indicate where families came from and where they went when they did not stay. I tried really hard to identify the single hired men and girls with different and often inscrutable surnames – somebody’s ancestor they just can’t find anywhere.

“This pretty well played to my strong suit – local resources. I have become very well practiced in consulting a long, long list of relevant local resources, on line and hard copy, mostly at Fenton and at home, both common, rare, and unique. And I developed some efficiency tricks.”

Meetings start at 6:30 p.m. and end before 8 p.m. For more information, call Wayne Leamer at 763-5938 (days) or 789-5313 (evenings).