Is the US Census considered a primary source?

Question

Is the US Census considered a primary source?

Answer 1

If there is LITERALLY no other source available, then it's an acceptable source. But it's not a primary source because only one person answered for everyone in the household...and that person could be a neighbor or a hired hand who didn't really know the answers to the questions and did their best to guess at it. That's why different years of birth, places of birth of both the person and their parents and estimated values of their belongings exist.

The way the Census Bureau worked then (and still works today) is that the enumerator has to make three attempts to contact someone who lives in the household. Before 1920 it could be anyone over the age of 10. If the family didn't speak English or no one was home on the 3rd try, anyone in the neighborhood who knew anything about the residents could answer. As long as half of the questions could be reasonably answered, it was considered a closed household and they moved on. If they couldn't find anyone who knew anything about the family, they kept going back to at least find the number of people who lived in the house and whether they were American citizens or not. The reason being that when you get down to the real reason for the census ever since 1790, it's been to determine Congressional representation based on population of the state and the number of eligible voters. If all else fails, that's the information the enumerator was trying to get.

Answer 2

Yes it is, it can help you with locating family that may live in the same area as many families did back then. I found several different familys in a two mile area three of which I had hunted for for a long time. You must remember names may be spelled wrong, so always double check facts with other type of documents.

Answer 3

G's mom gives a great answer.

I would just add.. that many persons see transcripts of the census image, and are not aware that the transcriptions can have mistakes.  The image is more "primary" than a copy.

Answer 4

A primary source is defines as a document that contains first-hand information about an event, or information recorded at the time of an event.  

Therefore, the Census IS a primary source: it recorded information about who lived in a place at a given time, and it was recorded at that time.  

This doesn't mean the information is necessarily accurate, it simply means it was recorded at the time, based on the first-hand account of people living in the place where the census taker visited.