Thought some of you might be interested in how much of the information on our family is discovered.

The United States has collected data about its population since 1790 and continues to collect data every 10 years.

Decennial census records are confidential for 72 years to protect respondents’ privacy.

Currently, the National Archives has the 1790 to 1940 census records available to the public.

When the Founding Fathers of the United States convened the Constitutional Convention in 1787, they had no idea that they would, in the course of their deliberations, create incredible opportunities for generations of American family history researchers.

While Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution does not directly mention the preservation of vital personal information for future generations, it does instruct the government to conduct a decennial census in an effort to fairly apportion the number of federal representatives from each state, as well as to decide on the amount of direct taxes to be levied. That effort to take stock of the U.S. population every ten years has produced, as a natural by-product, the greatest source of genealogical information available to U.S. researchers.

Recognizing their value to researchers, the National Archives began to microfilm federal census records in 1941, and with microfilming came the ability to make duplicate copies, then to digitize them. Because of technological developments, federal census records can now be researched via the Internet from a home computer or at the nearest archives or library.

From the first enumeration in 1790 to the most recent in 2010, the government has experienced difficulties in gathering precise information for a number of reasons. At least one of the problems experienced in extracting information from individuals for the first census continues to vex officials today: there were and still are many people who simply do not trust the government’s motives. Many citizens have worried that their answers to census questions might be used against them, particularly in regards to taxation, military service, and immigration. Some have simply refused to answer enumerators’ questions; others have lied.

Another factor that comes into play in the accuracy of every census record is the competency of the enumerator who recorded the information. Individuals were not necessarily well-educated or qualified for the job, and anyone who has studied census records knows that good penmanship was not a requirement. Census takers were political appointees who were frequently chosen because they were of the correct political affiliation in a particular time and place, or just knew the right people.

Wages were definitely not an incentive for would-be census takers. In 1790, even the highest pay rate, one dollar for fifty persons, barely covered an enumerator’s expenses. In 1920, payment was on a per-capita or per-diem basis—sometimes a combination of the two. An enumerator was paid between one and four cents per person, depending on the urban or rural setting of the district to be counted.

The United States has always been home to a large number of immigrants, and those who did not speak English well presented still another problem for the census taker. Often, enumerators could hardly understand the information given to them by people with foreign accents. Names were frequently misunderstood and misspelled by enumerators, to the extent that many do not even begin with the correct letters, making them hard to find in census schedules and almost impossible to find in indexes. The German name Pfeiffer could easily be heard and committed to paper as Fifer, for example. An Irish census taker in Cleveland recorded the Polish name Menkalski as McKalsky in the 1920 census. Places of birth may have been equally difficult to translate into English.

Whether recording information from a foreign-born or American-born individual, some enumerators took the quickest way to get the job done. Some used initials rather than given names, some used nicknames, and some omitted places of birth, value of real estate, occupations, and other details. In boarding houses, hotels, and clusters of workers’ cottages, enumerators could easily overlook entire families.