We have been studying the migrations of the descendants of nine men who came to Massachusetts before 1650 and have compiled a computerized database that includes all the people born before 1860 in the patrilines. Thus we have what the nine genealogists who studied these families thought was close to a complete list of family members alive in 1850. Here we focus on our attempts to find these individuals on the 1850 federal census.

To facilitate our task, we made up a search list that contained all males alive in 1850, but we omitted females known to have married by 1850. The search list included both the last known place in each individual’s record before 1850 and the next known place after 1850. The list was deliberately over-inclusive. In the 30% or so of the cases in which we did not have death dates for individuals, we carried them on the list until they were 100 years old. Again, the census is supposed to have been taken as of 1 June, but we included anyone who was born or died in 1850, whether it was before or after that date. All told, we searched for 7,627 individuals, about two-thirds men and one-third unmarried women.

American women’s disdain of employment in domestic service was common knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the logic behind this disdain was not. Lillian Pettengill investigated why American women viewed domestic service so negatively. In her research, based upon actual experience as a servant, Pettengill found that a major complaint about domestic employment was the “social stigma” attached to it (ibid.: 366). More recent research on domestic service supports her findings. Katzman (1978: I4ff.) found that most American women viewed household employment negatively in large part because of its lack of prestige in American society. Young native-born white women refused opportunities for domestic work for fear that they would be looked down upon by friends, lose their social position, and be less attractive on the marriage market.

In 1986, 585 out of 5,686 members of the Association of American Geographers declared their allegiance to the Historical Geography Specialty Group; among 50 AAG specialty groups, the historical geographers ranked 7th. Yet one prominent human geographer regards historical geography as “overdetermined,” an “empty concept” conveying “few (if any) significant analytical distinctions” (Dear 1988: 270). Dear’s argument is that, by definition, all geography should be historical, since “the central object in human geography is to understand the simultaneity of time and space in structuring social process.” So the only subdisciplines of human geography which have any intellectual coherence are those focused on distinct processes—political, economic, social. To me, even this distinction is unrealistic and impracticable for research purposes. But Dear does not go so far as to argue that historical geography or other “overdetermined,” “multidimensional,” or “peripheral” subdisciplines are wrong, merely that they are incidental to geography’s “intellectual identity.”

Much of the historical literature on working women has emphasized the extent to which employment varied along racial and ethnic lines. Domestic service in turn-of-the-century America attracted by far the largest proportion of employed women, and female domestics tended to belong to specific ethnic and racial groups. Immigrant domestics, most often Irish, Scandinavian, and German, were generally from areas of the so-called European marriage pattern, and employment for these women was normally temporary and limited to the life-course phase preceding marriage. Domestic work of this sort was a product of small-scale rural economies and was associated with late marriage. It was further marked by shared productive activity among all household members and by loosely defined social roles. In contrast to immigrants and native-born white servants, black domestics were older and far more likely to combine wage labor with marriage and motherhood. Their greater proclivity for day work and separate residential patterns, although clearly southern in origin, was replicated in northern cities and represented a trend toward the application of industrial work rules to domestic service (Dudden 1983). In other words, immigrant domestics seemed to compose the informal, “help” component of the domestic labor force, while black women, although marginalized and subject to discrimination in employment, appeared to represent an expanding, semiprofessionalized segment of the nation’s servant pool.

The problem of census undercounts, a familiar political issue for modern groups or instrumentalities that consider themselves underrepresented in the Census Bureau statistics, has only recently attracted attention from historians. While the modern “miss rate” is potentially high among some groups (the reason for the emphasis on the homeless in the 1990 census), the general rate of underenumeration appears to have diminished in recent censuses. The bureau acknowledges a net undercount of 5.6% of the population in 1940; the error declined gradually to an estimated 1.4% in 1980 (Burnham 1986; Anderson 1988; Edmondson 1988).

Nineteenth-century censuses no doubt contained more serious errors. Although he did not have underenumeration specifically in mind, the administrator for the 1870 census said that “the censuses of 1850, 1860, and of 1870 are loaded with bad statistics. There are statistics in the census of 1870,I am sorry to say, where some of the results are false to the extent of one-half. They had to be published then, because the law called for it; but I took the liberty of branding them as untrustworthy and in some cases giving the reasons therefore at some length” (quoted in Sharpless and Shortridge 1975: 411). Strikingly modern quarrels surrounded the accuracy of the 1840 Boston and New Orleans censuses, while the errors in the 1870 enumeration of New York City and Philadelphia were sufficient to cause recounts of both cities (ibid. ; Knights 1971: 145).

Political historians have long depended on aggregate records of political behavior—“election returns”—as a crucial resource in the historical study of American politics. During the past 30 years, however, the “new” political historians have increasingly turned to the U.S. census to reveal relationships between political and social behavior in the American past. The veritable revolution in American political history in recent decades, in fact, has largely depended on the political analysis of census records. Political historians now routinely mine the U.S. census for social, demographic, and economic information about voters and officeholders, states and regions, specific decades, and even “political eras.” Census data are most crucial to the political history of the nineteenth century and have benefited, in particular, the debate over levels of voter turnout, the study of political leadership through collective biography, and the ethnocultural model of political behavior.

Quantitative historians who mine diverse sources of evidence usually fret over the quality of their raw materials. Most papers that introduce new sources of data attempt to explain who originally collected the evidence, why it was collected, and how the actual use of the data may differ from the original intentions. These discussions often include estimates of omissions or biases in the records and may explain the sensitivity of results to underlying assumptions.

With a few notable exceptions, scholars have given surprisingly little attention to the quality of census data (see Ginsberg 1988; Furstenberg et al. 1979; Sharpless and Shortridge 1975). This neglect is remarkable in view of the public debate over the accuracy of the modern censuses, the conventions of scholarly scrutiny that apply to other types of records, and the widespread use made of census documents by nearly all disciplinary approaches to study of the past. Stimulated in part by the declining costs of entering and managing large databases, historians have intensively used the manuscript schedules of population for the nineteenth century, and numerous projects were recently completed or are planned for those of the early twentieth century (e.g., Ruggles and Menard 1990). Researchers have also made considerable use of additional schedules collected by the U.S. census beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, including those for slaves, manufacturing, and agriculture.