Reconstructing the 1850 Census Enumeration of New York and Brooklyn

Daniel Miller, Columbia University

This paper describes the results of an effort to recover spatial information from the US Census' 1850 enumeration of New York City and Brooklyn, New York. It also details the computational methods that make that reconstruction possible. The automated matching of census records with other documents of the same vintage makes it possible to enrich historical census materials with addresses, occupational descriptors, and other information that otherwise was not documented within the Census itself. Record linkage allows for a reconstruction of the work of historical Census takers, indexing and plotting their movements as they walked the city and gathered data. Understanding the spatial, sequential character of enumeration is key to facilitating accurate matches between Census and city directory records, especially. Extending previous work carried out under the Mapping Historical New York project, this paper will both update and provide more detail on the record linkage, match selection, and spatial information recovery methods that have evolved over the last three years to allow for a granular mapping of individuals recorded in the Census across the wards, blocks, and dwellings of the 1850 city. The linked, historical data that result will be documented in this paper, with the intention of introducing them as open-source resources for scholars of New York City history to integrate into their own research. The resulting data are also featured in the Mapping Historical New York project website, which primarily seeks to visualize dynamics of immigration and neighborhood change in Manhattan and Brooklyn from 1850 to 1920 with geocoded US Census microdata. In addition to discussing the limitations of methods that spatially reconstruct enumeration, this paper will illustrate how the development of these methods has facilitated deeper insight into how the two cities' populations were surveyed, counted, and recorded in various sources.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 118. Project Development