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sg's avatar

I'm a data and government info librarian, so read this newsletter as soon as I saw it this morning! (And I'd already ordered this book for my library a few weeks ago and am psyched to read it).

I don't often look closely at the stories in the Census in the work I do, but am endlessly fascinated by them. When the Census 1950 enumeration scans were released earlier this year, I looked up all of my family members I could think of and even in a few lines felt really connected to them -- for example, I learned my great grandmother worked as a Census-taker herself. My grandfather (who died before I was born) was a veterinarian in a rural agricultural area and under "how many hours per week do you spend working?" he had an emphatic "???", which told me that he probably scoffed at the question 🙂

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Micheline Maynard's avatar

If you watch Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., you know the importance of Census data in unlocking family mysteries. A research librarian used Census data to help me trace the history of my grandmother’s bakery a century ago. The Census is a delightful thing.

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