Census stuff
02/27/2010 16:48
Similarly, ancestry.com has all the U.S. census forms, and they have a search engine. This is cool, because you can track a person from census to census, and see where he (yes, for most of the census years, they only took down head-of-household names, which were 99% male) lived at least every ten years. The transcription seems relatively good, but it isn’t perfect. So it pays to be a little creative with spellings, if you don’t find your person right away. And look at the original form, because you might see something the transcriber didn't, if you know what you're looking for.
Similarly, if your person has a common name and you find too many, there are tricks to narrowing down your candidates. Some of these are other sources (lots of county and town histories are also available on ancestry and google), some take advantage of the fact you can compare census data from a series of years side by side. I use this feature to try to eliminate people. If I’m looking for John Doe who lived in Springfield in 1800, and there are five John Does in the 1810 census, I can see whether some of the others lived in the same places in 1800 and 1810, and eliminate those candidates. I can also compare family sizes, since the census data (on the original forms, which can be viewed) includes counts of males and females, bracketed by age. A little quick math, and you’ve got another clue. Neither of these is foolproof, of course -- a lot can happen in ten years. But they can point you in the right direction.
So, back to my original point. All this info is available now. Seems like it’s going to be very difficult from now on, to make vague, generalized points about persistence, migration, and a whole bunch of social changes related to demographics; when you can check the numbers and say something precise. So I’m checking the numbers and names in all the places I’ll be writing about. Not because I want to do a “migration history,” but because I just can’t imagine what type of excuse I’d use to get around knowing what happened with the people, in these places I’m studying.
I think what I’m going to find is that people were a whole lot more mobile than we think they were. I’m only halfway through my first town dataset right now (the earliest one, covering 1790-1840), and it seems like as many people leave the town as die in it. This type of thing has been done on a limited basis (when it was paper-based, and MUCH harder) for a few cities (cf. Thernstron & Knights on Boston), but I don’t think a close study has been done for a rural town. So maybe there will be some surprises. A quick glance at the 1850 census of one of the towns in Upstate NY I haven’t really started on yet, showed that over 200 people were born outside the U.S. I’m not sure of the total population yet, but that’s probably between 10% and 20%. Most of these people were young and from the U.K. (Irish slightly outnumbering English & Scottish). There were also a lot of Canadians, about a dozen Germans, a handful of French and Dutch, and one Swiss. Don’t know what this means yet -- the town isn’t right on the Erie Canal, and it’s a full generation after its construction. So these aren’t all trench diggers who decided to hang around. Maybe there are stories that no one has found because they were buried in such a huge mountain of data. Stay tuned...
