Call Number: HA This 25 volume set contains the results of the Census. Some volumes have been digitized and are available online from the U.
Abstract of the Eleventh Census by United States. Census office. Available online from Hathi Trust External. Compendium of the Eleventh Census: by United States. Abstract of the Twelfth Census of the United States Call Number: Microfilm HA. Available online from Census Bureau Available online from Hathi Trust External This is a digest of the contents of the ten volumes of the Twelfth Census, and is designed for the use of the general public who may not have access to the main volumes or may find this digest more convenient for ready reference.
The Library also holds the reprint. Census Reports Statistical Atlas. Presents the 12th Census data on population, vital statistics, agriculture, and manufactures in maps and charts.
Census Bureau This page includes special reports published with the Census data on various topics such as employees and wages; occupations; women at work; mines and quarries.
Print versions can be located at the Library of Congress by searching the online catalog. Geographical Distribution of Population. Bulletin 1 by United States. A12 no. Bureau of the census Call Number: HA Illiteracy in the United States. Bulletin 26 by United States. Bureau of the Census.
Bureau of the census. Census Bureau These bulletins contain preliminary results of the Census on demographics, agriculture, manufacturing and industry, and wealth. Census Bureau This page includes links to digitized final reports of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the year Abstract of the Census.
Available online from the U. Size mattered to Americans, who could not help seeing growth as a sign of divine favor. He was far from alone; in the beleaguered early months of the Civil War, Lincoln took solace in predicting an eventual U.
The enumerators went out again in and , but the task of processing census data was increasingly becoming a headache for civil servants. Sometimes it took almost a full decade to tabulate the results—at which point, of course, it was time for a new census to begin. The questions just kept flowing. Here is one example, from the form, which shows the census burrowing into the land itself:. With the census looming, the Census Bureau was desperate for a faster way to count.
In , it held a contest: using samples of population statistics from St. Louis, it asked challengers to invent new ways of processing data. To general amazement, a twenty-eight-year-old former census employee named Herman Hollerith won easily, with an invention called the electric tabulating machine. One part of the contest asked the candidates to divide the data into categories.
It took the second- and third-place competitors forty-four and a half hours and fifty-five and a half hours, respectively. Hollerith, the son of a German immigrant, grew up in Buffalo, tinkering with machines. He knew, from his census work, that it took too long for an enumerator to write out answers by hand, and he had noticed how quickly train conductors could punch passenger tickets as they moved through a crowded car. He reasoned that a device could record the census in a similar way.
After trying a few different models, Hollerith settled upon a long card, approximately six and a half inches by three and a quarter inches, as the best vehicle for the vast amount of information he was processing. These holes represented every point of information on the census: country of national origin, age, marital status, general health, languages spoken. Suddenly, the most exquisitely sensitive points of identity could be instantly noted and calibrated.
The census was by far the largest yet designed; it asked more questions than ever before and deployed enough enumerators 46, to constitute a decent army. Those enumerators were supplied with twenty-five million population schedules, weighing more than three hundred tons. They sent back sixty-two million punch cards, all the same size and machine-readable.
An experienced tabulation clerk could process eighty punch cards per minute. This new technology led to another huge census, the results of which added up to 21, pages. Thanks to Hollerith and his invention, it was the most detailed statistical portrait of the United States that had ever been created.
But the Census did not stop there. It also introduced large-scale data processing to a world that was hungry for it. Following his triumph, Hollerith pursued other ventures, including a census of Russia the czars had not condescended to count their people since , and an immense data project for the New York Central Railroad.
His energies were also drawn to the private sector, and Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which merged with other manufacturing companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. In , it was renamed International Business Machines, or I. Hollerith had solved the processing problem, but he had not quite solved the issue of where to store all of the paper that was needed in the pre-digital era.
The first ten censuses, from to , had been bound into books, which cumulatively added up to 4, volumes. But the Census was simply too big to bind; it was five times larger than all the previous censuses combined. The population schedules alone would have added up to thirty thousand volumes. The chief clerk of the census predicted that it would require a seven-thousand-foot shelf to store them all.
Finding more than a mile of empty shelf space was difficult, even in a city that was already known for its bureaucracy. So the pile sat around, sparking no joy among the officials charged with its safekeeping.
Unfortunately, almost all of the census returns from that year were destroyed in a fire in the U. Commerce Building in Washington, D. That led to a public outcry for a National Archives to preserve important national documents, and the United States did eventually create such an archive. However, it was too late for the census. Only fragments of it survived the fire. If you are very lucky, some of your ancestors may be in the surviving fragments.
Fragments that survived came from scattered counties no records from an entire state survived in the following states:. You can search these surviving census fragments online at Ancestry. Many beginning genealogists get frustrated with the year gap in census records from to A lot can change in a family at that time, after all.
The good news is that there are alternate record sources that can help you fill in those blanks. Among them are:. These are some of the best sources for discovering ancestors in and in all the years between and Most cities of moderate to large size put them out starting just after the Civil War.
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