Progress Report – Census Project
Jan 2nd, 2010 by sharbrough
On 29-Oct, Footnote announced the intent to complete the US Federal Census collection – at least the extant population schedules. At that time, we wondered what to expect. Would the project be completed quickly? Would other titles be pushed aside so that this project could be done sooner?
Two months later, we still don’t know for sure. But we do know what has been published since. Here is that report.
CENSUS PUBLISHED
In the past two months, pages have been added to four census titles on Footnote.
- 1930. Added 3,158 pages. Approximately 1,500 pages remain to be published.
- 1920. Added 19,164 pages. Over 2 million remain.
- 1910. Added 22,053 pages. About 1.7 million remain.
- 1900. Added 22,531 pages. More than 1.5 million remain.
I’m sure that Footnote will not proceed at this pace. The one thing that is for sure is that things will change. But for the sake of explaining the remaining work, let’s calculate the number of months that it would take to finish these titles at the current pace. The 1930 census is effectively completed, so I’ll eliminate it from the calculations. Based on 8 weeks of production, here are the numbers.
- 1920. Average 3194/wk. 643 weeks to go.
- 1910. Average 3676/wk. 471 weeks to go.
- 1900. Average 3755/wk. 487 weeks to go.
Please don’t think that Footnote will take 9 years to finish the 1910 census, or 12 years to finish 1920. They will most likely speed up. One of the interesting things to learn in 2010 is how much they do speed up. There are about 5 million pages in earlier census years that haven’t started to hit the site yet.
OTHER TITLES – HOW ARE THEY DOING?
Since the census announcement, Footnote has added at least 1,000 pages to each of the following titles:
Census – US Federal 1900
Census – US Federal 1910
Census – US Federal 1920
Census – US Federal 1930
Civil War Soldiers – Union – MO
Texas Death Certificates
Naturalizations – NY Eastern
Naturalizations – NY Southern
City Directories – Toledo
Civil War Soldiers – Union – KY
City Directories – Minneapolis
Civil War “Widows’ Pensions”
WWII Captured German Records
Approved – Alabama
Approved – Virginia
Massachusetts Vital Records
Massachusetts Vital Record Transcripts
Dachau Entry Registers
City Directories – New Orleans
Homestead Records
City Directories – New York
City Directories – Detroit
WWII Nuernberg Interrogation Records
News – Poughkeepsie Journal
News – Fort Wayne News (IN)
News – Florida Today
Notes
Newspapers sent by Small Town Papers don’t compete for scanning and indexing resources with other titles.
Census titles comprised about 65,000 pages. The three newspapers, about 60,000.
Total production was just over 1.25 million pages.
In other words, for the first two months after the announcement, census publication was 65,000 out of 1.25 million pages, or about 5%. With annual production at about 10 million pages, we would expect to see about 500,000 pages of census material at that pace. My guess is that it will be somewhat higher.
Who knows what the next progress report will show?
