State of Nevada Adds Census Files

The state of Nevada has added an online census database. It's available at http://dmla.clan.lib.nv.us/docs/shpo/NVCENSUS/.

This site is pretty amazing. It contains data from the federal manuscript censuses of 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920. The 1890 census material is not here (it was burned in a warehouse fire). The 1861-1862 territorial census and the 1875 census were both skipped, considered to be unreliable.

There are two kinds of searches you can do here -- "Find People" and "Averages." Find People starts you off by having you choose which census year you want to search. Choose a year and you'll get -- man, you'll get a huge search form, allowing you to search by such variables as age, profession, color, marital status, whether or not they're deaf, parent's birthplace, etc.

There's a link next to some of the search forms that supposed to provide a list of possibilities for that particular search, but unfortunately it led to a 404 error when I tried it. This is a pity because it's difficult to think of all the possibilities for profession, for example -- it was through sheer luck that I found the three people in the 1880 census who gave their profession as "medicine man."

You can combine these searches, making it easy to find the 30 married literate gamblers in the 1880 census. Names are hyperlinked to pages of information which includes information about the person, information about their location and information about the census itself.

There ARE some errors here. I find myself strangely intrigued by Joe Dunlin, the aged-zero gambler from Illinois, whose father was from Ireland. This prodigy was already married and was literate. Of course the age information is an error. The site administrator admits there may be errors like this, and encourages users of the site to report errors to him ("Contact the Webmaster" mail links are on the bottom of every page. )

Posted to US-Nevada