Blog Posts by Subject: Census Data

You should always start your genealogy research by interviewing your relatives. Carefully record all of the names, dates, and places that they tell you. Don’t worry if Uncle Joe and Aunt Joan have a different story about where grandma was born, write it all down. With that step complete, it is time to start looking into the United States Federal Census. Census takers assiduously attempt to include all Americans, and they typically do a good job at this task. This is what makes it such a valuable genealogical tool. With few exceptions, the census is generally complete, but not always easy to search.  

It's already been a couple of months since I and a colleague attended a morning of presentations by budding entrepreneurs finishing up their session of FastTrac® NewVenture™. Two weeks before that event my colleague and I did a presentation here at SIBL for them - our Market Research and library resources "boot camp". Now we had a great opportunity to see for ourselves how, and to what extent, these folks have used our SIBL resources to help create a five minute "pitch" of their businesses.

It is striking the United States has not developed a discourse of precarity. Today, the gap between rich and poor stands at its widest in history, and the unemployment rate hangs around at 8.9%; this statistic does not include the long-term unemployed, the underemployed (those working in part-time positions), and those simply not seeking work at all. There is no discourse or vocabulary for precarity, yet it is structurally integral to how our economy (whatever that word might mean) functions.

Most of my teachers in elementary school could remember the "good old days" when corporal punishment was acceptable in the public school system, so it's not surprising that they were kind of harsh when it came to feedback on lackluster performance.  If one of them called on me as I was drifting into an afternoon nap, my puzzled expression was often met with, "You had better start practicing how you're going to say, 'Would you like fries with that?' because you won't make it to college sleeping through class."