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It was a conspiracy theory of gargantuan proportions. Mrs. J.C. Drysdale connected the smoking dots between three fires in public buildings and concluded something sinister was afoot.

A fire in the Virginia Capitol, a fire in an Ohio city hall, and a fire in the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C., all within hours of each other, clearly pointed to a conspiracy to destroy documents relevant to her family's inheritance claims.

Could all three fires have been ignited by some nefarious character intent on defrauding Mrs. Drysdale? That's what she asserted in her 1921 letter to T.G. Fitzgerald, the federal Census Bureau clerk.

If the fires were deliberately set to spite Mrs. Drysdale, someone had one heck of a grudge. The fire, on January 10, 1921, in the Commerce Building, according to one Massachusetts newspaper, was "in the nature of a national and historic calamity."

Why was it a calamity? The original census records, from 1790 to 1910, were stored in the Commerce Building.

Unfortunately, the fire began in the basement where most of the census records were stored. Fortunately, many of the records were in the fireproof basement vault, and others were on upper floors. The 1920 census was in another building across town.

The 1890 census, however, was doomed.

Stacked outside the vault in a file room, the nearly 20 million sheets of the 1890 census holding priceless information about American residents didn't escape the flames and the torrent of water launched into the building from 20 firefighters' hoses.

Efforts to salvage the water-, fire- and smoke-damaged records should have started as soon as the smoke cleared. When you're dealing with government bureaucracy, though, "should" doesn't always translate into action.

Over the next decade the soggy, charred mess was shuffled among various storehouses and buildings in Washington before it was finally destroyed in the mid-1930s.

What was saved? Records of around 6,000 people. That's an abysmal number, considering that more than 60 million people were enumerated.

What was lost? Plenty. Census-takers had questioned residents across the country about their names, ages, birthplaces, occupations and ability to read and write. Military service, parents' birthplaces, number of years in the country and naturalization status were additional inquiries.

Women were asked about the number of children they had, both living and deceased. Notations were also made about physical and mental health and about property ownership.

All of those crucial details, penciled onto separate pages for each family, went up in smoke. Experts couldn't pinpoint the cause of the fire. Many theories, including Mrs. Drysdale's, were ultimately rejected.

See the National Archives site for a listing of the few schedules that survived .

Despite the irreplaceable loss of the 1890 census, family history researchers can turn to other records from the same time frame to help fill in the gaps. Next week, I'll review various records to help pinpoint your family in 1890.