How was information submitted for the 1920 and 1930 U.S. Census?

Question

Did the head of household submit the info? When looking at images of the actual census, who's handwriting am I looking at? If the information is incorrect, who's mistake was it?

Answer 1

I believe the handwriting is that of the census taker. Sometimes the census taker did not understand the person giving the information, or vice versa.

From Boston College web site...

Research Guide: Census Data
"The decennial census is the only data gathering operation in the United States that is mandated by the Constitution. The first census was taken in 1790 and has continued every 10 years, in the years ending in "0". Its primary purpose is to provide the population counts that determine how seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are apportioned. Census figures also are required to draw congressional and state legislative district boundaries, to allocate federal and state funds, to formulate public policy, and to assist with planning and decision making in the private sector."

Answer 2

You should notice it's all the same handwriting usually. It's done by enumeration district with a supervisor responsible for an area. Some areas were very big, but simply the information was verbally asked and written in the person house usually (sometimes in a general meeting location). Each Supervisor had some lee way.

Mostly a person knocked on the door, and presented themselves and took rool, one household at a time. There were rules. However, the census taker was not always fluent in the language spoken by the person home. Furhter, this was not verified, simply asked an answered. Sometimes the legal name was given, but especially when language barriers occured, a nick name was given. Some times a relative did not know the ages, so there was a good guess.

Women with children from previous marriages rarely used the birth name of the child, so all children in the household had the same last name as the father. If the grandparents raised the child or realtive, it was the child's last used last name.

Mistakes occured and were sometimes the census takers, sometimes the providers. Sometimes the information was a guess, and sometimes there was trouble understanding, and sometimes it was a lie.

But certain mistake patterns do occur. Such as if a husband and wife were born a couple years apart, a mistaken census might have them born in the same year.

Big issues to consider... Maternal deaths were frequent, and so its important when finding different deaths to correlate a number of factors. Yes it's possible a man had two wives name margaret, or Elizabeth, etc. Also a persons name may be her birth in one census and a nick name in the next. So it's important to be careful.

My grandfather joined the army in 1942 and was not required to submit a birth cert, just his word. In the 1960s he joined the merchant marine and then he need his birth record. So you'll find everything based on verbal statements through the next 1940 census too.

Answer 3

The census enumerator went house to house.
Any resident of the household over the age of 13 was/is allowed to give information on everyone in the house (even servants can report information). That's why there are so many inconsistencies.
If no resident of the property could be found by the third attempt, then the enumerator was allowed to ask information of anyone in the immediate neighborhood.

It has to be remembered that the only legitimate purpose for the census is to determine voting populace for the purpose of determining legislative representation. If they didn't get names, dates and ethnicities right, it was OK. As long as they found the true count of the household, they were sufficiently happy.

Answer 4

during that time the form was not sent out the way it was for the past census, someone came around and asked questions. a lot of people did not trust the census taker and sometimes gave false information as a way of protecting theirselves or no info at all meaning they turned the person away, in that sense the taker had to get the info from another source [neighbor?] if the taker had limited education which was common back then then whatever they wrote was based on the education they had and the education of the person they were talking to. [reason for misspellings etc]

Answer 5

You are seeing the census taker's hand writing. They made many mistakes. If you look even further back half of them couldn't spell.