Pauper

Pauper began as a legal word, not just another way of saying poor. Under poor laws that came from England, a person became a pauper once the community started to support them, and official reports counted paupers, not everyone who was poor.

The 1850 census asked enumerators to find out whether anyone in the family was a pauper, in the same column as deaf, blind, insane and idiotic persons. Overseers' accounts, town reports and poorhouse registers also name paupers, and for a struggling ancestor these may be the only records that survive.