Historical census information now online

Nevada is the first state to have all its federal manuscript census data available on the World Wide Web.

"It's really fun," said State Historic Preservation Officer Ron James.

Census information about Nevadans from the 1860 to 1920 federal censuses is at the Nevada Department of Cultural Affairs site at www.NevadaCulture.org.

The State Historic Preservation Office, an agency of the Department of Cultural Affairs, worked with Associate Professor Ken Fliess of the University of Nevada, Reno, Anthropology Department for nearly 10 years to complete the project.

"This database is extremely important for researchers, genealogists, and anyone interested the history of the West," James said.

Unlike other indexes that simply list people's names, the database includes all the information recorded by Census enumerators.

"I looked for women miners and found a couple of men," he said. "We've got some typos, but with 310,000 records, you're bound to have some."

"I had one person who was trying to find out the ethnicity of a last name. I put it in, and sure enough we found some. We could see where they were born, and we found out they were members of that person's family. We found them in Virginia City in 1880."

James said the data "will tell you where they were living, right to the street address."

The U.S. Constitution requires a national Census every 10 years. The first documentation of the western half of the Great Basin occurred in 1860, when it was part of the Utah Territory. Southern Nevada, at the time part of New Mexico Territory, escaped the attention of the Census enumerators who neglected to cross the Colorado.

The 1890 Census was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1921, so the project does not include that year. It includes information on about 310,000 people documented in 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920.

It is possible, for example, to identify everyone from a certain ethnic group or track people who lived at a specific property.

"There is a tremendous potential here for developing community histories, profiles of houses and treatments of all sorts of aspects of our past," he said.

"Because Nevada's population has been so fluid, it is possible that many people had ancestors who were in the state at one time or another. I have been able to use early censuses to locate Nevada relatives for people who had no idea their family had been here."

James said the project could not have been completed without contributions from the Nevada State Legislature and Fliess. The Legislature provided seed money; Fliess donated a great deal of time, as did Gnomen Inc., a Nevada-based data management firm.

"Nevada is known for having a dynamic demographic history because of its economy and its growth patterns," Fliess said. "The state's population has grown and declined more dramatically than in most, if not all, states. The comprehensive encoding of this information creates remarkable opportunity for research."

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For information on the Department of Cultural Affairs, call 687-8323; or go to www.NevadaCulture.org.