Apologizes for posting this so late in the week- the next shall be revealed in a more timely matter. Annotated Sanborn maps for the city have been included in the post above this one.
I decided to look at the 1880 Fredericksburg, VA census from ancestory.com. I used the Mar. 1886 Sanborn maps for the city as well as cross referencing with the 1889 city directory and 1885 business directory, both found here: http://resources.umwhisp.org/fredburg.htm. All sources used were in digital format. The pages selected for this project were pages 45, 46, 47 and 48 of the census. Fairly quickly I noticed Fredericksburg’s “quark” which was hinted at in class: The city at this time lacked building numbers. Needless to say this unique characteristic made the city directory invaluable. But the directory is not infallible; I found many entries on my census pages lacked a recorded address. The only clue I have to go on for these mystery dwellings is that every other listed entry for my source sample was always Main ab/bel/cor another street. So it is likely these unregistered entries are located somewhere near Main Street.
The sample of 200 people on my pages was majority white in race. There were also some Mulatto and Black entries, but the majorities of these were domestic servants and linked to the entry of a white family in the area (It was interesting that servants as well as borders were linked to a family unit, as were grandchildren and stepsiblings or parents). The exception to this were the Black men listed as laborers which were not usually linked to another family, and the one Black family recorded which had a male child who was not working (listed as “At home,” the only example of this I found. The parents were a laborer husband and “keeping house” recorded wife). I found race listings as curious, esp in that Chinese and Mulatto were categories (I was under the impression that Asian immigration was very limited, save for the “paper sons” loophole, but I may be thinking of a later time period such as the early 1900’s).
Going off of amount of servants as well as the types of jobs listed for each family unit/individual I would hazard a guess that the neighborhood my sample overlapped on was one in which middle to upper middle class members lived; Many white individuals worked in skilled jobs, socially visual jobs (tax collector, city sergeant, etc) Some ran their own businesses (grocer, hotel owner, etc). Black and Mulatto individuals uniformly were stratified into the labor and domestic servant roles. Most women were “At home” or counted wife duties as “keeping house” but some women worked: as housekeepers if white (often widowed with no family) or domestic servants if black- some more adventurous worked as teachers (both in sample unmarried and sisters), seamstresses or in one case was enrolled in school as a student. *May add a more extensive breakdown of this later* Family size ranged but the typical family in these 4 pages appears to have had 3-6 children. Extended families with nieces, parents, and stepsiblings were not uncommon. It would have been nice if deceased relatives/children were listed, but they were not in this census so only living relatives are recorded (families size therefore may be skewed lower than reality, if all relatives were counted deceased children included).
I will post the mean median and mode for the age spread later, but it basically came out to a bell curve with the main section hovering around the 9 to 42 range, with 24 being the most common age. The youngest listing was 2 months while the oldest was 80.
As for birthplaces…VA was the most common listing. From parent birth locations it can be inferred that most families were long time USA citizens, however there were some from Ireland and a white couple which had the wife from the West Indies and the husband from the District of Columbia. *may add numbers for how many at each location) The other birth locations mentioned included:
NY
Penn.
Ireland
Maryland
Kentucky
Ohio
Hanover
Illinois
Wash D. C.
South Carolina
Tennessee
Massachusetts
All in all this has been an interesting exercise. I just wish I had left myself more time to explore its nooks and crannies, so to speak. Feel free to post with your thoughts and feelings on what I have posted so far. And again, apologies for the lack of map/images- they will be amended in shortly.
Katelyn Shaver's Blog 
I found your findings on the expanded race listings on the census interesting because on my 1900 census of Durango, Colorado, there was no listing of these races. I wonder if we both were using federal census data or if you used one taken by the State of Virginia?
Did you find many individuals listed as Chinese or other immigrants from countries you did not expect? Understandably these would not appear in your pages of the census due to the upper middle class area in which it was taken. My population had a large amount of first and second generation immigrants, mainly from Ireland, England, and Germany.
My last question is about the youngest parts of the population. Were they listed as being “at school” or “at home” or did not have a listing under occupation at all?
I enjoyed your post and look forward to seeing the maps of the area you examined.
That is a good question. I am not sure if the data mine uses comes from the federal or state source; I will have to check into that (I had assumed it was from federal but you never know). It actually listed five racial types total: Mulatto, Black, White, Chinese and Indian, but did not go into detail on how these categories were defined. What categories did the 1900 census of Durango, Colorado use (if any)?
Alas there were no Chinese or Indian listed individuals within my sample. I was surprised by the scattering of Irish immigrants as well as the two people from the District of Columbia and West Indies (both of which were white, although it does make me wonder…if they were in fact of Hispanic or some such orgin, would the takers still list them as “white” at this time period?) I was equally surprised that there were so few immigrants and none from England or Germany, at least within my sample.
As to the youngest parts of the population, every white child was listed as at home until age 18 or so, with the exception of one girl which was categorized as at school (I was not sure if this meant where they were physically located, or that the oher children were being homeschooled or not schooled at all, which given the upper-middle class nature of the sample seemed unlikely on the last interpretation). For the mulatto and black families, the young children were listed as at home until around year 10 and above when they all uniformly listed jobs, usually of the service sector persuasion.
Thank you for the comments btw. They provide much fodder for ruminations. 🙂