Census statistics in the 1800s

My older daughter was doing research into our family lineage through my recollections of births of my grandparents back to about the 1840s. She was able to find my Great Grandfather who was born in 1844 who was a Captain in the Northern Army of the Civil War from Kansas. This would have made him 21 at the end of the war in 1865. She was able to find his wife who was born in 1851 and the names of their 5 living children including my father's father who was born in 1890 also in Kansas. My great Grandfather owned a farm where he raised his kids there in Kansas and owned a Pharmacy. Likely he saw so much death that after the war he started selling medicines to people as therapy for what he saw in the war. He sold his pharmacy in 1925 and my father told me he lived to be 105 years old. If this is true he lived until 1949 a year after I was born.

She also found out through Census records that my grandfather on my mother's side was born in 1883 and I already knew my mother's mother was born in 1888 in Philadelphia before her family's home burned down there and they all had to return to Scotland from where they were from. There were 12 children in her family and they all returned to the U.S. where the oldest got a job at one of the Omaha, Nebraska newspapers. The oldest got jobs for those interested in staying in Omaha from Scotland after they went there one by one. My Grandfather came back to the U.S. from Scotland with his new wife which was one of the 12 brothers and sisters who returned to the U.S. and lived in Nebraska. My grandfather then Graduated from Moody Institute as a Methodist Minister and was offered a position in Seattle, so he took his wife and three daughters(the youngest my mother) to Seattle to live there where my mother met my father in the early 1940s and married him in 1946 when she was 27. I was born when she was 29. We then moved to California in 1952 where our family mostly has lived ever since in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Bernadino counties as well as Northern California.