What is the Census dataset?
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The US Constitution contains provisions for conducting a ‘decennial’ (once every ten years) census, which is a detailed count of the nation’s population. The US government conducted its first census in 1790, and has continued to do so every ten years, through the latest census in 2020. Since 1902 the census has been managed by the US Census Bureau.
Beginning in the 1990s, a large research project called the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, or IPUMS, began creating a digital version of the US census records. This eventually grew into a collaboration with the genealogical organization FamilySearch and the genealogical companies HeritageQuest and Ancestry.com. IPUMS has also built their own online portal for accessing census data. The result of this huge ongoing project is that census records now exist in a searchable, digital online format that is much more accessible to experts and the public alike. IPUMS has also expanded its census work to other national censuses, so that it now includes a total of about 1 billion individual records from more than 100 countries. The Keweenaw Time Traveler project has partnered with IPUMS to incorporate census data for the Houghton and Keweenaw counties for the period from 1880 through 1940 (excluding the ‘lost’ 1890 census). Our census dataset contains nearly 380,000 individual records for this period, making it the biggest record set in the Keweenaw Time Traveler. |
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What can I discover using this data?
For people interested in history the census is a priceless record. This is because it attempts to record each and every US citizen, and includes important details including their name, neighborhood, age, sex, family status and composition, occupation, immigration status, country of origin, language spoken, and literacy, among others. As a result, the census is the largest, most detailed, and most complete record we have for people living in the US - and in the Copper Country! - and it preserves many fascinating details about their lives.
While the census is an invaluable resource, it rarely recorded a person's residential address. One of the major accomplishments of the Keweenaw Time Traveler is to map the census data by connecting it to other historical records that DO include residential addresses. Not every person could be mapped to a specific address either because they lived outside of town where the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company did not create maps, or because there were not enough other records to determine exact address. When no address could be determined, we mapped people to a street, a town, a mining "location," or the "enumeration district," which is how the Census Bureau maps the country.
While the census is an invaluable resource, it rarely recorded a person's residential address. One of the major accomplishments of the Keweenaw Time Traveler is to map the census data by connecting it to other historical records that DO include residential addresses. Not every person could be mapped to a specific address either because they lived outside of town where the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company did not create maps, or because there were not enough other records to determine exact address. When no address could be determined, we mapped people to a street, a town, a mining "location," or the "enumeration district," which is how the Census Bureau maps the country.
