Course Guide ~ HIST 125 / Black Metropolis

Census Research

Please complete this research task in advance of class on Thursday. You will also be writing a short journal entry in response to this research and the related questions. You don’t have to write written response to all of the questions but please do consider them in writing your responses.

1. After training in class you will be assigned an address, which you will then look up in the 1928-29 Polk’s city directory to locate the names of the residents of this house. For assistance accessing the city directory, first check out this Polk Screencast.

1. 1. Who lives at this address?

   2. How many people?

   3. What are their names?

   4. What do you notice about the directory?

   5. How is it organized?

   6. How are people listed?

   7. What is included? What is not included?

2. Look up one of the names listed at this address in the 1930 census, which can be found on this Census page. For assistance looking up census names, first check out this Screencast (Illinois Census ScreenCast). One of these names will work but you may need to try a few different names. You know that you have found the right person when the address you were given matches the address on the census page. One more tip: sometimes the name of the residents may not appear on at the very top of the Census Data page. Use Ctrl+F to find one of your residents on the Census Page.

   1. ​What do you see in the Census?

   2. What kind of information is collected? What kind of information is not collected?

   3. How does the census record race?

3. Next, you will return to the name you first looked up and see if you can find this person in prior or subsequent census (1910, 1920, or 1940) years.

   1. Before starting, consider this question: how would you know if it is in fact the same person? What clues would you use?

   2. Does this person appear in an earlier or later census data?

   3. If you are able to find the same individual in an earlier or later census record, consider the following questions:

      1. Are there any inconsistencies?

      2. Is this data set reliable?

      3. What can you say about this individual by looking at these earlier/later records?

      4. How did this person’s life change?

   4. If you are not able to find this person in other census years, what additional data would have been helpful in doing this research?

4. Imagine that you are one of the people on this block who is answering the questions posed by the census taker. You might want to take a look at these instructions given to census enumerators in 1930.

   1. What do you think that interaction would have looked like?

   2. Would the respondent have understood that these data could be used by social scientists,  historians, and students 85 years later?

   3. Is it (in your opinion) unethical to examine these data?

5. Return to the census page for 1930 and copy/paste the census data for this entire page into a spreadsheet. For help copying and pasting the census data, check out this excel data screencast (Excel Data Screencast)

6. Then create a clean and clear spreadsheet that includes header names (for Gender, Age, Marital Status, Race, Relationship to Head of Household, Birth Year, Birthplace, Immigration Year, Father’s Birthplace, Mother’s Birthplace). You can at this point delete empty columns as well as the columns for Titles and Terms, Sheet Number and Sheet Letter.

7. You will then manually add (and fill in) columns for the following categories:

   1. Street address (ie 198 College Hill Rd)

   2. City (ie Chicago)

   3. State (ie IL)

   4. Zip code (leave this column blank)

   5. Occupation (fill in when possible or write in “NA”)

   6. Literacy (this data comes from the census page’s column for “whether able to read or write.” You can list either yes, no, or NA)

8. Save this excel spreadsheet as [Your Last Name]CensusPractice.xlsx and answer the following questions.

   1. How many different buildings are there are in this data set?

   2. How many different households or families can you identify in the building?

   3. Using this data set, what can you say about the people living in this part of the neighborhood?

   4. Compare what you learn by looking collectively at these data vs. at an individual. Returning to the ethics question, is there a difference between looking at a single person and the aggregate data of a number of individuals

​Please upload the excel spreadsheet file to Blackboard along with your journal response. We will be returning to it in November!