This book is a little different from most of the books I have reviewed. You can tell by the subtitle: “The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them”. Bouk looks primarily at the 1940 census, but he looks at much more than that. He wanted to look deeply into a census to try to understand the interplay between the detail in the 1940 census and the reports that the government issued right after the census was taken, which anonymizes the data. What was lost in the anonymization? He also looks at the people who came up with the questions for the census, and the people who actually asked the questions at the doorstep.
There are some things in the 1940 census that you might have noticed, but did not know the significance of. For example, apparently there was some resistance by some people about being asked about their income. Some people may have said they had no income, even though they had worked during the year. Business owners could just say they worked on their own account and avoid giving a dollar amount, but wage earners were supposed to give a number. Both of my grandfathers appear to have answered the question honestly; at least, they did give the census taker a specific number.
There have been a few innovations that have come out of all of the processing of the census. Apparently, the punch card system was created to help process the United States census, created in time for the 1890 census by a statistician who worked on processing the 1880 census. And the Census Bureau was one of the first to purchase the UNIVAC computer. The Soundex was not designed to assist genealogists. It was created as a WPA project so the staff could more easily do look-ups for people wanting proof of their age for their Social Security application. However, one thing I did not realize is how the 1940 census was used for the war effort. Unfortunately, is was also used to identify people of Japanese, Italian, and German descent, both citizens and non-citizens.
If this was your family, how would you research them? If you have done any work on your own genealogy, you have undoubtedly looked for your ancestors in the 1940 census. While 1950 is available now, when Bouk wrote this book, 1940 was the most recent census available. How did they answer the income question? Would they have been impacted by the screening for potential enemies and spies? The country was just recovering from the Great Depression; can you tell that from the data, or do they seem to have financially recovered? There are many questions that the census did not ask directly, but you might be able to tease out an answer anyway.