Our invitation to participate in the 2020 Census arrived two days ago. Unlike 2010 when paper questionnaires were sent out to verify and update some 145 million addresses, the 2020 Census is being conducted via the internet. As the invitation states, "The Census is using the internet to securely collect your information." And, as the invitation to respond elaborates, "We need your help to count everyone in the United States by providing basic information about all adults, children, and babies living or staying at this address."
I responded online on March 20th as the front of the invitation envelope above illustrates. I was encouraged to do so expeditiously by the assurance that "completing the questionnaire will take 10 minutes on average." This proved to be mostly true. I finished well under the average time, but from a genealogical point of view I was quite disappointed I was able to do so!
Many of us will recall that there was a great deal of controversy over whether or not the 2020 Census would include any question regarding citizenship. There is no explicit citizenship question. But the paucity of information collected was what allowed me to finish much more quickly than I recall it took to complete the 2010 Census (even allowing for a multi-page paper questionnaire a decade ago).
There are only twelve (12) questions in the 2020 Census. Those twelve questions essentially seek only fifteen (15) different factual data points.
[The invitation form letter and all the questions asked on the 2020 questionnaire can be viewed here.] The data points sought can be summarized as: number of people living in the household; whether any additional people stay in the household; what is the status of the dwelling place (owned under mortgage or loan, owned free and clear, rented, or occupied without paying rent); telephone number of the person answering the Census questions (usually Person #1 and head of household); sex of each person in household; age of each person in household; date of birth of each person in household; whether each person named in the household is of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin; the race of each person in household; geographic or national origins of each person in household; are there any persons who are household members but usually live or stay somewhere else (such as at college, military, jail, etc.); and how is each person in the household related to Person #1 head of household.
A recent article in TIME by Jennifer Mendelsohn is titled, "
The Census is more Than Just a Form. It's a Window Into the History of American Families." Viewed broadly across all the decennial censuses in the last 230 years this might well be true, but when the 2020 Census is examined years from now the window it will provide will be small indeed and more like a peephole compared to some of the individual censuses of the past. As Mendelsohn so correctly stated in her article, "
As a tool for capturing larger, wide-scale truths about America, the Census categories and questions themselves–as well as the questions that were not asked–can never be entirely divorced from the mindsets of those doing the asking." [Emphasis added.] Mendelsohn offers examples of this selective data slant on our family history and one that is painfully obvious was the treatment of slaves as nameless entities on schedules that listed only sex and perhaps age ranges as identifiers.
Mendelsohn also walks us through a selective comparison of the data collected in various censuses over a fourty year period 1900 - 1940. It is noted that the 1900 Census collected 28 pieces of demographic information (compared to a pared back 15 in this year's Census). The questions that were not asked and the data that has been lost can be can be seen in a comparison of what was gathered in the 1940 Census (the last federal Census to be released to the public) with what is being gathered in the twelve questions this year.
In 1940 there were at least 26 different factual data points gathered on the federal Census. The name, age at last birthday (rather than as of a specific date as this year), sex, color or race (but not origins as this year), and relation to head of household were asked in 1940, but much more was gathered too and the additional questions are interesting and definitely of interest to anyone doing genealogy research. For example, in 1940 marital status was asked for every person, whether school was attended since March 1, 1940 and highest grade of education completed was asked. Citizenship was asked and coded to indicate A for alien, Pa for first papers received, Na for naturalized citizen and AmCit for an American citizen born abroad. Enumerators in 1940 wanted to know where each person had resided on April 1, 1935–if in the same house or if not then in the same place (town) and if in a new town then the town, county and state were to be given. People were asked if they lived on a farm or not and there were many questions about employment: did a person work for pay or profit in private or for nonemergency government work from March 24 - 30, 1940 and if not was work during that period for emergency government work such as the WPA, NYA, CCC etc.; was the person currently seeking work and if not was it because the person had a job or business; what kind of work did the person have (housework, school, disabled, or other). How long a person had worked and what wages or salary they made were recorded. If a person was unemployed the enumerator collected information about the duration of unemployment up to March 30, 1940. The class of work if employed was captured: PW for wages or salary, GW for government work, E if an employer, OA if work was on one's own account, and NP if one was an unpaid family worker. Even more specifically, the Census recorded the number of weeks a person had worked in 1939, what the person's income was for that year, and whether or not the person even had income of $50 or more from sources other than money wages or a salary.
As Mendelsohn said, the Census captures wide-scale truths about life in America by the questions asked on the Census and by those that are not asked. In 1940 with the nation not yet in WWII and still struggling to get out of the Great Depression, employment was obviously of tremendous importance and so the window of the Census was wide open to focus on those issues, to gather the factual data about the status of work and pay in the country. And genealogists would note that the 1940 Census would not be of any help in determining where a person's mother and father had been born as earlier censuses were. This is undoubtedly because those questions were not asked and so there is no 1940 data on the birthplace of a person's parents (a real loss for genealogy research). It was not as important at that time as perhaps it had been earlier in the 20th century and during the latter half of the 19th century when immigration was more common and more frequent.
I think it is clear that the window into the status of American family life was open much wider in 1940 than it appears to be in 2020. The stresses and priorities in 1940 are more obvious and the data being mined is richer than it will be when genealogists look back on the 2020 data once the Census information is released to the public in 2092.
The federal Census is not perfect (see,
Federal Censuses -- Purveyors of Alternative Facts? A Case Study) and only looks at a moment in time every ten years. For genealogists it has often been a very valuable tool for doing family history research, although it was never intended originally to serve that purpose. It is true that some censuses have been more productive for genealogy research than others and that probably reflects in part the stresses and controversies of the times. Privacy and protection of personal information in this computerized age may be responsible for the paucity of genealogically valuable information being collected even though it will be a statistical lifetime before the data is publicly available. The 2020 Census looks to me to be one of the least genealogically friendly in some time.
To quote Jennifer Mendelsohn again, "However imperfect, the Census provides a snapshot of American life at a given moment in time, telling us what those in power thought was important to know–and what wasn't–about who was doing what with whom at that particular moment in America." This is demonstrably true when examining the censuses over large periods of time, but in responding to the 2020 Census I can only think that the new census is less like an open window into the history of American families at the dawn of this new decade than it is like a closing camera aperture narrowing the focus on less and less subject matter. If this marks the beginning or continuation of a trend, then future genealogists might find the federal Census less and less useful for family history research and the question will become, "What, if anything, will replace the Census as a genealogical tool?
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Copyright 2020, John D. Tew
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