NYPL Blogs: Blog Posts by Subject: Census Data

Direct Me NYC: NYPL Helps You Find New Yorkers in the 1940 Census

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:19:40 -0400

The genealogy world is buzzing with today’s release of the 1940 Federal Census, but some have been disappointed to discover that the newly released data cannot yet be searched by name. Never fear, NYPL to the rescue!

NYPL Labs has created a fantastic new online tool to help you locate New Yorkers in 1940. In conjunction with the Milstein Division, One-Step, and the National Archives, our tool will help you find any New Yorker listed in the telephone directory. Direct Me: NYC will help you get from the name in the directory to the census information by using One-Step to convert the address to enumeration district and opening up the corresponding census pages.

Read more about Direct Me: NYC in the Wall Street Journal: "City Library Eases Way For Searching 1940 Census"

Find out more about searching the census for genealogy reasons: Everyone Counts: Using the Census for Genealogy Reasons

Learn more about Direct Me: NYC by visiting our FAQs

Everyone Counts: Using the Census in Genealogy Research

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 07:58:45 -0500

—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.

The United States Federal Census is constitutionally mandated and occurs every 10 years. Its purpose is to count the number of people living in the United States in order to apportion Congressional districts. For the first censuses, beginning in 1790, getting a count of people is almost all that it did. As years passed, the census became a way to gather even more data about the nation, such as health, housing, employment, growth, and other statistics. Census results are released in two ways. Almost immediately, statistical data is released. This is how we know the ethnic make-up of an area, population counts, and other demographic information to use for analytics and congressional apportionment. The other information, called population schedules, is withheld for 72 years. Population schedules contain a wealth of information about the residents of the United States. These documents include names, ages, and relationships of everyone in a household, amongst other details, such as whether they rent or own their home, their language spoken, and birthplace of their parents. It is a jackpot for genealogists.

The best strategy for searching the census is to start with the most recent available census and then work backward in time. Begin genealogy searches with the census if your ancestors were in the United States before 1930. In April of 2012, the 1940 census will become available, and this will be the new threshold for U.S. federal census information. You will most likely find your ancestors in the census, and these can be the first documents that you will use to add evidence to your family stories. To help interpret what you find, use Finding Answers in U.S. Census Records or Your Guide to the Federal Census for Genealogists, Researchers, and Family Historians.

When you do find your ancestors in the census, you will find other significant facts about them. This will further help you locate and interpret other documents. Censuses record family members as a group, so this will be key in connecting one generation to another. This is where you will find out whether it was Aunt Joan or Uncle Joe who was correct about Grandma’s birthplace. You can search the census by name in databases such as Ancestry Library Edition, HeritageQuest, and Fold3. The census is also available on the web through FamilySearch Record Search (only some years) and The Internet Archive (not indexed by name).

There’s a common story told when someone cannot find their ancestors in the census. Usually it involves some sort of outlaw activity such as bootlegging, bank robbery, or a general distrust of the government. However, these ancestors are usually listed in the census. It might just require some search savvy to track them down. The important thing to remember is to be flexible and try many different searches. Creativity and persistence are good qualities to use in census searching.

Here are some tips for searching for your ancestors:

Do not fill in every search box — this may exclude legitimate results that include your ancestors. Broadening your search will mean more search results to sort through, but it's more likely that the results will include your ancestor.
If there is a unique or less common name in your family, start with only that name.
If the name you are searching is extremely common, e.g. “Michael Davis,” then you should add more information to help focus your search.
If you do not immediately find your ancestors, do not give up. Use alternative spellings of names and be open to new information.

Further notes on spellings:

Census takers did not check identification papers: mistakes, variations, and complete misunderstandings are extraordinarily common.
Our ancestors may have been semi-literate or illiterate.
Our ancestors could have used different spellings of their own name, or completely changed their names between two different census years.
Abbreviations may throw off your search results — “Rbt” for Robert, “Ptk” for Patrick, “Chs” for Charles, etc.
A person that is known by a nickname in their youth could change to a different version of the name: Molly might become Mary, Bobby might become Bert, etc. This is especially common in homes where a child is named after a parent. For more information on nicknames, consult a name dictionary, which will usually list variations of names.
There may be more than one person with the same name in the same family: Mary Catherine and Mary Elizabeth might be sisters, but will the census taker record them both as Mary or as Catherine and Elizabeth?
A person may Anglicize the spelling of a name over time: Roberto in one year of the census may become Bob in the next.
A person using a different writing system or alphabet, such as Hebrew, Cyrillic, or Chinese, may have no say in how the census taker interpreted and recorded their name using the Roman alphabet.
Initials may interpreted as a name: “J.M.” may have been recorded as “James,” even if the “J” actually indicated Joseph or Jedediah.
Reading the handwriting used in the census may be difficult.

Another strategy is to search the census geographically. You can often find an address for your ancestor in a city directory and then search for the address in the census. The Library has an extensive collection of city directories on microfilm, and there are also directories available in Fold3. If your ancestor lived in a small town or rural area, you may want to search everyone in that area with their last name.

Every year of the census is slightly different from the next. You can view a complete index of questions for every year of the census, and this will help you determine what type of information you can expect to find.

Some notes on particular census years:

1790-1840 censuses include the names of the heads of households only. Everyone else living in a house is listed by approximate ages only.
1850 is the first federal census to include the names of all members of a household, including children.
1870 is the first census after the Civil War and therefore is the first census to list all African Americans.
1880 is the first census to included street addresses.
1890 census was mostly destroyed in a fire. Only a fragment of the census remains.
States and territories joined the United States at various time periods. You should have some idea of the history of the state you are investigating to know what years it was included in the federal census. For example, you will not find Kansas in the census until 1860.

There are other censuses besides the federal census. Many states conducted their own censuses for their own purposes. New York has several years of state censuses, and the Library owns a complete set of the surviving census data. For a complete list of New York state censuses, consult New York State Censuses & Substitutes. New York City even conducted its own census in 1890 using police officers as census takers because it believed that the federal census had undercounted its population. This is a familiar accusation, and luckily this census exists because the federal census for that year was destroyed. Although Ancestry Library Edition has added some of the data from the New York City and New York state censuses, it is currently incomplete and includes only a few books. The Library has a complete set on microfilm.

Other censuses include a separate census of veterans for 1890, separate censuses for American Indians, and Mortality schedules, which are lists of people who died in the year before a census was taken. References such as the Red Book and Census Substitutes and State Census Records include suggestions for census alternatives for each state — which may include ideas for searching tax lists or voter registrations when you can not find an ancestor in the federal census. If you have hit a brick wall in your research, you may want to try alternate strategies.

View this pdf for a list of The New York Public Library’s census holdings, or stop by the Milstein Division in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building for more help with census research.

Adventures in Marketing Research: SimplyMap

Kenneth Johnson, Science, Industry and Business Library — Tue, 31 May 2011 06:04:34 -0400

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.

In Market Research, there is no one size fits all. Web entrepreneurs will have a different research perspective than those who want to start a "bricks and mortar" retail operation. As was brought home to me at the FastTrac event, in the latter case one of the most useful electronic resources available here at SIBL is our database SimplyMap, which will be the subject of the rest of this posting.

What is SimplyMap? Well, it has two parts or functions—one, as the name indicates, a map. The other creates reports of statistical data from the database's menu of variables. The map function serves as a Geographical (sometimes Geospacial is used) Information System (GIS) program allowing the user to "simply" map, or project, one data set on all or part of the U.S. In the market research context, this allows you to profile a specific geographic area, and/or compare one or more areas for different kinds of demographic or other variables.

So, on to an example using median household income for midtown Manhattan, including our SIBL area—both zipcodes (a report) and census tracts (maps). Information will be for 2000 (Census count), 2010 (estimate) and 2015 (projection).

As a side note—for those of you interested in maps and mapping, don't forget that NYPL has an excellent map division, from which many maps have been included in our NYPL digital library (like the one to the left here). Also, we have a map rectifier online program, layering old maps over current geographical information (like this one showing the same map as an overlay).

Anyway—here are some of the examples of what can be generated, with links to pdfs of full versions:

Median Household Income, 2000 - by Census Tract

Median Household Income 2015 (projected) - By Census Tract

Locations Geographic Unit HH Inc., Median ($), 2000 HH Inc., Median ($), 2010 HH Inc., Median ($), 2015 New York County, NY County $47,811 $65,027 $75,168 10016, New York, NY Zip Code $67,516 $92,832 $106,540 10010, New York, NY Zip Code $64,837 $89,418 $101,234 10003, New York, NY Zip Code $61,796 $83,843 $93,905 10001, New York, NY Zip Code $44,466 $61,215 $71,341 10011, New York, NY Zip Code $63,318 $87,877 $98,701 ALL OF USA $42,781 $55,970 $67,791

Table Showing Median Household Income for SIBL Zipcode (10016) in Comparison with Other Midtown Zipcodes

Bar Chart for Median Incomes (Generated using Microsoft Excel)

[PDF of Table and Bar Chart]

Explanation of Choices of Presentations: The map examples were produced customizing both the data ranges and map colors. Census tracts were used to better present variations in small geographic areas. The report was exported to Microsoft Excel, from which a variety of graphic presentations can be easily created. Zip codes were chosen for the report to make selected geographic units more easily recognizable.

Lastly, here is a list of the variables currently available:

Census: data from 2000; estimates for 2007-2010; projections from 2012-2015
Consumer Expenditure (more detailed than the Bureau of Labor Statistics data): 2007 through 2015 projections
Business Counts: 2007-2010
Market Segments (groups of consumers, e.g., In the Armed Forces, Very Rich Households): 2009-2010
Quality of Life (criteria such as crime or weather) : 2009-2010
Consumer Price Index: 2009-2010
Retail Sales: 2009-2010
Sales Potential (e.g., Amusement Index - A higher value indicates more than average amusement opportunities near the geography): 2009-2010
MRI Consumer Survey Data (sales of a large variety of goods and services by number of households and percentage of households): 2007-2010
Life Stage Clusters (young, middle-age or older households, further broken down by income, marital status, etc.): 2007-2010

For a live demonstration of how to use SimplyMap, please feel free to visit us any time at SIBL. You can access this database on our computers (no time limit) or on your own laptop through our wireless network.

Precarity: A Reader's Guide

Trevor Owen Jones — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 10:10:34 -0400

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.

Simply defined and more broadly placed, precarity designates non-standard employment which cannot support a household and sustains an insecure relation between poverty and survival. Also, it points out the immaterial, affective, cognitive and creative demands now made upon much of the global workforce, wherein subjectivity itself must be inhabited by the zone of work. There is no more 'clocking in and clocking out.' Precarity means cash in hand, payday loans, internships, volunteers working without pay, zero benefits, telecommuting; precarity means taking what you can get, and getting what you can take.

More essentially, precarity is inherently gendered: the "feminization" of post-Fordist labor is part and parcel of the fragmentation, feast-or-famine nature of work today.

While workers of yesterday organized on the shop floor and made demands of the state for an existence within its purview, today, the decentralized, estranged and balkanized workforce of the service sector suffers from increasingly draconian austerity measures from above, and at the same time embraces the refusal of work. This 'double bind' paradoxically explains our globalized world, and yet little mainstream arguments have endeavoured to explain it. The second paradox could be formulated as follows: the more precarity is ignored, the more it is apparent to the rest of us.

2009 and 2010 witnessed a global wave of strikes against the growing immiseration of populations, a mass mobilization of students against the Bologna process and the corporatization of education, and street insurgencies against the forces that wish to maintain the status quo ante bustum. There is no way to understand the way we live now without drawing on the conceptual resources of precarity and the precariat.

Articles:

Precariatans of all countries, unite! by Andrew Robinson

Promissory Notes: From Crises to Commons (PDF) by Midnight Notes Collective

The Anti-Anti-Oedipus: Representing Post-Fordist Subjectivity by Mathias Nilges

Precarity as Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception by Brett Neilson

Books:

The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello

Precarious Life by Judith Butler

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Precarious Rhapsody by Franco 'Bifo' Berardi

Uses of a Whirlwind by Team Colors Collective

Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Urban Outcasts by Loic Wacquant

Web Sites/Blogs:

Edu-Factory

Precaria (Italian)

Generation-Precaire (French)

Just Seeds Collective

Understanding Precarity

Precarity Webring

Will More School Lead to a Better Job?

Amy Armstrong — Mon, 10 May 2010 10:49:32 -0400

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."

Actually, I think the strategic napping may have been how I sustained interest in school long enough to make it through college, and eventually, graduate school, but I'm sure there is room for debate on that topic.

What puzzled me when I first graduated from college was that employers didn't start breaking down my door with offers that came with nice offices, a salary of $50,000/yr, a company car and fringe benefits. I spent my first post-graduation summer as an assistant manager to two men who had barely finished high school and moved-up to a $27,000/yr purchasing position that I could have handled in fifth grade. In fact, I probably would have been better at it then. At least data entry and filing seemed sort of glamorous to me as a fifth grader.

Since graduate school, I can apply for a wider range of jobs that pay a decent salary, and periods between positions have gone from brief to nonexistent. So, in that sense, I am already noticing some benefit, but I still buy the cheapest anything I can find, and I don't see a solid gold sink in my future. In other words: even with most graduate degrees, the jobs don't pay all that well; not at first. Rumor has it that eventually, hitting the books does pay off.

According to a special study released by the US Census on educational
attainment and earnings in 2002, earnings tend to increase with level of education. They also found that being male is helpful, but claim that even that gap narrows at higher educational levels.

Given all this, it seems like the best response to a rotten economy is to go back to school and get retrained for a field that's actually growing. A lot of people think they need to see a career counselor to identify a growing field and an educational program, but it's easy to do on your own. Just review the information on growing occupations from the Occupational Outlook Handbook or O*NET Online and start searching for programs on a site like Peterson's

Like most things that are easy to do, this isn't always the best thing to do. I don't want to discourage anyone who is interested in ongoing learning from pursuing higher education, and I am not going to say you should totally ignore projections. However, it's important to remember that when you identify growing occupations and possible programs, you're only looking at a small part of the big picture.

The economic landscape varies significantly from state-to-state, city-to-city, town-to-town, etc. Resources like The Occupational Outlook Handbook provide projections for national trends. Just because economists anticipate a growing need for paralegals in the United States does not mean that the demand for paralegals in Mammoth, CA is going to be the same as it is in New York City. The same holds true for compensation. Also, these projections of general trends don't tell prospective job seekers anything about the amount of experience employers typically will look for in candidates in these high growth occupations. Just because an occupation is listed as in demand doesn't mean that employers will be so desperate to fill those positions they will take anyone with the right paper credentials and a pulse. I've wished it were true many times, but sadly, it's not.

The most important piece of information you need to make any career-related decision is whether or not you would enjoy the work and be good at it. Just about every hospital in the country needs nurses, but if you have a fear of blood and hate working with people, it is pretty unlikely you will make it through the clinical portion of nursing training let alone land and keep a job as one.

Before you decide to take the plunge and go back to school, do your homework:

Research the local market where you plan to work. If you are relocating, visit eNYPL and check-out Cities Ranked and Rated by Bert Sperling to find out who the top employers are as well as the major industries where you plan to live. If you are planning to stay close to home, take a look at the current job postings to get an idea of what's available and what employers are looking for in terms of both education and experience.

Find out more about the credentials you actually need to pursue the career you are considering. Most of the training information in the Occupational Outlook Handbook is very general. Try visiting the websites of professional associations for the occupations you are interested in. You can find relevant associations listed in the Occupational Outlook Handbook, Career Cruising, and Ferguson's Career Guidance Center.

Learn more about what you're getting into if you're seriously considering retraining. Is training actually available near you? If not, can you go to it? Can you afford the training without going into enormous debt? Estimate student loan payments using the calculator on Mapping Your Future

Ask yourself if you would be better off updating skills in your current occupation than pursuing something completely different. Meeting with a Career Coach at the Science, Industry and Business Library's Job Search Central can help you identify your transferable skills and weigh your options for retraining. Depending on what you're looking for, the coach might even be able to refer you to agencies you haven't even thought of for retraining assistance. Book an appointment online here.

In a competitive market, higher education will pay off in the long-run, but it's important to consider whether or not you are in a position to make a substantial long-term investment. A BA or MA might help you build a healthy retirment fund and a nice nest egg several years post-graduation, but it's not going to make paying next month's rent any easier.