1910 Census

GRHC - April 14th, 2010

On it's 100th anniversary, the story of the 1910 population and agricultural census.

Transcript

One hundred years ago, in April of 1910, the supervisor of the census for Grand Rapids faced the same problem his counterpart faces in 2010. He was anxious to make sure every citizen of the city was counted. Enumerators, all of them men, had been working for two weeks to secure the names. Supervisor Boer asked anyone who had been overlooked to notify his office so the family could be visited to collect the data. Unlike today where families fill out the information and send it by mail, in earlier times each dwelling was visited and the enumerator wrote the information for each member of the household.

In 1910 the government also did an agricultural census on over 6 million farms in the nation. Farmers were asked the amount of acreage, yield and selling price of all crops harvested, the value of livestock, dairy products, poultry, eggs, fruit, etc. as well as livestock, poultry and bees on hand as of April 15, 1910. Some other questions asked how much was paid for farm labor, the amount paid for hay, grain or other articles, the number and value of animals slaughtered, and a statement of mortgaged indebtedness.

An Agricultural census had been taken every ten years since 1840; the 1890 was burned and those from 1900 and 1910 were destroyed once the data was extracted. A few agricultural census records exist in various archives.

Fortunately, the general population census records from 1790 to 1930 are available for researchers, except the 1890 census, which also burned. The 1940 census records will be released in April of 2012.