IPUMS has finalized databases for each of the United States population censuses from 1850 to 1880. These data are the result of collaborations between FamilySearch and Ancestry.com, which provided the raw data, and IPUMS, which enhanced the data with editing, standardized coding, inter-census harmonization, and documentation. We discuss the data capture process conducted by the nineteenth-century United States Census Office, construction of the modern datasets, and variable availability. We conclude by briefly discussing the potential and limitations of these data for social science research. The public data are distributed by IPUMS and available for researchers to use free of charge.

This article describes the development of IPUMS full count datasets of the censuses of slave inhabitants of the United States in 1850 and 1860. These data are a result of two collaborations. The 1850 slave dataset stems from a collaboration between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose volunteers transcribed the original manuscript forms, and IPUMS, which enhanced the raw data with editing, standardized coding procedures, constructed variables, and documentation. The 1860 dataset was the result of a similar collaboration between the genealogical company Ancestry and IPUMS. The article discusses the features of these datasets, their limitations, and suggests possible research uses.

The IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel (MLP) is a longitudinal population panel that links American censuses, surveys, administrative sources, and vital records spanning the period from 1850 to the present. This article explains the rationale for IPUMS MLP, outlines the design of the infrastructure, and describes the linking methods used to construct the panel. We then detail our plans for expansion and improvement of MLP over the next five years, including the incorporation of additional data sources, the development of a "linkage hub" to connect MLP with other major record linkage efforts, and the refinement of our technology and dissemination efforts. We conclude by describing a few early examples of MLP-based research.

<p>This article appraises kin availability and migration timing on French-Canadian child mortality in an early twentieth-century North American industrial city. The analysis is based on the exploitation of an original dataset constructed by linking the 1910 census data (IPUMS-Full Count) for Manchester, New Hampshire to Quebec Catholic marriage records (BALSAC) and geocoding census data at the household level (Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps). Our results suggest that the presence of maternal and paternal grandmothers in the city living in different households were associated with reduced child mortality and that French-Canadian women who arrived in the United States as children or young adults experienced higher child mortality compared to second-generation French Canadians and those who migrated at a later age.</p>

The North Carolina Healthy Food Small Retailer Program (NC HFSRP) was established through a policy passed by the state legislature to provide funding for small food retailers located in food deserts with the goal of increasing access to and sales of healthy foods and beverages among local residents. The purpose of this study was to qualitatively examine perceptions of the NC HFSRP among store customers. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 29 customers from five NC HFSRP stores in food deserts across eastern NC. Interview questions were related to shoppers’ food and beverage purchases at NC HFSRP stores, whether they had noticed any in-store efforts to promote healthier foods and beverages, their suggestions for promoting healthier foods and beverages, their familiarity with and support of the NC HFSRP, and how their shopping and consumption habits had changed since implementation of the NC HFSRP. A codebook was developed based on deductive (from the interview guide questions) and inductive (emerged from the data) codes and operational definitions. Verbatim transcripts were double-coded and a thematic analysis was conducted based on code frequency, and depth of participant responses for each code. Although very few participants were aware of the NC HFSRP legislation, they recognized changes within the store. Customers noted that the provision of healthier foods and beverages in the store had encouraged them to make healthier purchase and consumption choices. When a description of the NC HFSRP was provided to them, all participants were supportive of the state-funded program. Participants discussed program benefits including improving food access in low-income and/or rural areas and making healthy choices easier for youth and for those most at risk of diet-related chronic diseases. Findings can inform future healthy corner store initiatives in terms of framing a rationale for funding or policies by focusing on increased food access among vulnerable populations.

Children require a large amount of time, effort, and resources to raise. Physical help, financial contributions, medical care, and other types of assistance from kin and social network members allow couples to space births closer together while maintaining or increasing child survival. We examine the impact of kin availability on couples’ reproductive success in the early twentieth-century United States with a panel data set of over 3.1 million couples linked between the 1900 and 1910 U.S. censuses. Our results indicate that kin proximity outside the household was positively associated with fertility, child survival, and net reproduction, and suggest that declining kin availability was an important contributing factor to the fertility transition in the United States. We also find important differences between maternal and paternal kin inside the household—including higher fertility among women residing with their mother-in-law than among those residing with their mother—that support hypotheses related to the contrasting motivations and concerns of parents and parents-in-law.

This paper presents a new probabilistic method of record linkage, developed using the U.S. full count censuses of 1900 and 1910 but applicable to a range of different sources of historical records. The method was designed to exploit a more comprehensive set of individual and contextual characteristics present in historical census data, aiming to obtain a machine learning algorithm that better distinguishes between multiple potential matches. Our results demonstrate that the method achieves a match rate that is twice as high other currently popular methods in the literature while at the same time also achieving greater accuracy. In addition, the method only performs negligibly worse than other algorithms in resembling the target population.

The societal integration of immigrants is a great concern in many of today's Western societies, and has been so for a long time. Whether we look at Europe in 2015 or the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, large flows of immigrants pose challenges to receiving societies. While much research has focused on the socioeconomic integration of immigrants there has been less interest in their demographic integration, even though this can tell us as much about the way immigrants fare in their new home country. In this article we study the disparities in infant and child mortality across nativity groups and generations, using new, high-density census data. In addition to describing differentials and trends in child mortality among 14 immigrant groups relative to the native-born white population of native parentage, we focus special attention on the association between child mortality, immigrant assimilation, and the community-level context of where immigrants lived. Our findings indicate substantial nativity differences in child mortality, but also that factors related to the societal integration of immigrants explains a substantial part of these differentials. Our results also point to the importance of spatial patterns and contextual variables in understanding nativity differentials in child mortality.

Many US college students experience food insecurity (FI). Given most students are excluded from receiving federal nutrition assistance, additional efforts are needed to alleviate student FI. This perspective discusses proposed and enacted state statutes, resolutions, and bills addressing college FI to date, which range in depth, breadth, and success. Overall, states have demonstrated their promising role in addressing FI; however, college FI promises to be a continuing challenge, particularly given continued widespread unemployment that began with the onset of coronavirus disease 2019 and the global struggle for economic recovery.

This paper describes a method to reconstruct birth histories for women in the 1900 and 1910 U. S. census IPUMS samples. The method is an extension of an earlier method developed by Luther and Cho (1988). The basic method relies on the number of children ever born, number of children surviving, number of children coresident in the household and age-specific fertility rates for the population to probabilistically assign an “age” to deceased and unmatched children. Modifications include the addition of an iterative Poisson regression model to fine-tune age-specific fertility inputs. The potential of birth histories for the study of the U.S. fertility transition is illustrated with a few examples.

Historical record linkage has responded to two large opportunities in recent years. The growth of computational power and the emergence of full count historical census data are both revolutionizing...

This research note describes the growth of the slave population in the United States and develops several new measures of its size and growth, including an estimate of the total number of slaves who ever lived in the United States. Estimates of the number of births and slave imports are provided in ten-year increments between 1619 and 1860 and in one-year increments between 1861 and 1865. The results highlight the importance of natural increase to the rapid growth of the U.S. slave population and indicate that approximately 10 million slaves lived in the United States, where they contributed 410 billion hours of labor. A concluding discussion highlights a few descriptive statistics historians might find useful, including the cumulative number of slaves who lived in the United States by decade and the proportion of slaves who were living at various moments in U.S. history, including shortly after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and at the start of the American Civil War in 1861.

This paper describes a method to reconstruct birth histories for women in the 1900 and 1910 U. S. census IPUMS samples. The method is an extension of an earlier method developed by Luther and Cho (1988). The basic method relies on the number of children ever born, number of children surviving, number of children coresident in the household and age-specific fertility rates for the population to probabilistically assign an “age” to deceased and unmatched children. Modifications include the addition of an iterative Poisson regression model to fine-tune age-specific fertility inputs. The potential of birth histories for the study of the U.S. fertility transition is illustrated with a few examples.

Extended Abstract Total fertility in the United States fell from 7.0 in 1835, one of the highest rates in the world, to 2.1 in 1935, one of the lowest (Coale and Zelnik 1963; Hacker 2003). In some respects, the U.S. fertility transition is an ideal case study for testing theories of fertility decline. The population was characterized by remarkable ethnic, racial, and religious diversity and large group differences in fertility. Geographic differences in fertility were also large, reflecting spatial differentials in industrialization, agriculture, urbanization, school attendance, women's labor force participation, population composition, religion, and occupational structure (Hacker 2016). Unfortunately, our understanding of the U.S. fertility transition has been limited by poor data. A national birth registration system was not established until 1933, after the end of the century-long fertility decline. IPUMS samples of the 1850-1940 censuses have helped address the lack of birth registration data, but low sample densities-most census samples are limited to 1% densities-have limited researchers' ability to analyze contextual factors and small population subgroups. A few researchers (e.g., Wanamaker 2012; Lahey 2014) have continued to rely on aggregate state-and county-level data published shortly after each census. Others have relied on retrospective children ever born data published in the 1900, 1910, and 1940 censuses for ever-married women (e.g. David and Danderson 1987; Jones and Tertlit 2008). Although these data can be used to measure trends in cohort fertility from the early nineteenth century, selection issues distort the timing of the decline and the measurement of independent variables for analysis. This paper leverages the analytical power of new IPUMS complete-count microdata databases of 1850, 1880, and the 1900-1940 decennial censuses (a joint ongoing project between the Minnesota Population Center and Ancestry.com) to reexamine the U.S. fertility transition. The dataset includes nearly 600 million individuals spanning the beginning of the decline in the middle of the nineteenth century to its temporary end with the baby boom in the late. A major advantage of these complete-count datasets is our ability to examine individual-level, couple-level and household-level correlates of fertility at or near the time of childbearing simultaneously with contextual variables outside the household, including a measure of patrilineal kin propinquity and …

This poster shows the results of applying Luther and Cho's (1988) method of reconstructing birth histories to women in the 1910 IPUMS sample. The age/birth year of missing own-children -- resulting either from the child’s mortality or departure from the household -- are imputed using a probabilistic process together with each woman's partial birth history, number of children ever born, number of children surviving, and number of own children currently living in the household. The resulting imputed full birth histories are then used to calculate birth intervals and parity progression ratios and to model stopping and spacing behaviors in the middle of the fertility transition.

Although intermarriage is a common indicator of immigrant integration into host societies, most research has focused on how individual characteristics determine intermarriage. This study uses the 1910 ipums census sample to analyze how contextual factors affected intermarriage among European immigrants in the United States. Newly available, complete-count census microdata permit the construction of contextual measures at a much lower level of aggregation-the county-in this analysis than in previous studies. Our results confirm most findings in previous research relating to individual-level variables but also find important associations between contextual factors and marital outcomes. The relative size and sex ratio of an origin group, ethnic diversity, the share of the native-born white population, and the proportion of life that immigrants spent in the United State are all associated with exogamy. These patterns are highly similar across genders and immigrant generations.

METHODS Most quantitative research on fertility decline in the United States ignores the potential impact of cultural and familial factors. We rely on new complete-count data from the 1880 U.S. census to construct couple-level measures of nativity/ethnicity, religiosity, and kin availability. We include these measures with a comprehensive set of demographic, economic, and contextual variables in Poisson regression models of net marital fertility to assess their relative importance. We construct models with and without area fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity. CONTRIBUTION All else being equal, we find a strong impact of nativity on recent net marital fertility. Fertility differentials among second generation couples relative to the native-born white population of native parentage were in most cases less than half of the differential observed among first generation immigrants, suggesting greater assimilation to native-born American childbearing norms. Our measures of parental religiosity and familial propinquity indicated a more modest impact on marital fertility. Couples who chose biblical names for their children had approximately 3% more children than couples relying on secular names while the presence of a potential mother-in-law in a nearby households was associated with 2% more children. Overall, our results demonstrate the need for more inclusive models of fertility behavior that include cultural and familial covariates.

This study relies on IPUMS samples of the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, aggregate census data, and the timing of state laws criminalizing abortion to construct regional estimates of marital fertility in the United States and estimate correlates of marital fertility. The results show a significant lag between the onset of marital fertility decline in the nation's northeastern census divisions and its onset in western and southern census divisions. Empirical models indicate the presence of cultural, economic, and legal impediments to the diffusion of marital fertility control and illustrate the need for more inclusive models of fertility decline.