110 YEARS & COUNTING // 1880 CENSUS DATA FINDS MISERIES UNDER VENEER OF `GOOD OLD DAYS'

By SOURCE: PEG MEIER; STAFF WRITER  | 

Hundreds of homeless people are nothing new to the Twin Cities.

Neither is a nationwide trend to marry late in life, or never. And

more than a century ago, extended families of 20 and more people were

living together.

University of Minnesota researchers are poring over U.S. census

records from 1880, and they're finding interesting parallels and

differences from life today. The four-year project is just beginning,

so most of the discoveries are of an "Oh-wow-look-at-this!" variety,

rather than statistically valid looks at American life in 1880, which

will emerge later.

Four women are entering information into the computer on one of

every hundred American households on the 1880 census form. The

data-entry workers are having lots of fun poking around in the past.

"It's like living in the 1880s for eight hours a day," Justine

Denny said.

One of the things she and her colleagues find fascinating them is

that babies as old as a year were still unnamed. Even some 2-year-olds

were listed that way. The researchers speculate that one reason for

delaying naming was that people feared their children wouldn't survive

the era's terrifying epidemics, such as the diphtheria that ravaged

whole communities.

The homeless were an appalling problem in 1880 too.

In a time when the nation's economy was improving from the last

big economic upheaval of 1873 and immigrants were pouring into

Minnesota, 210 railroad workers couldn't afford housing. They slept in

railroad cars in what is now the northeast part of downtown St. Paul.

Listed on the census sheets as laborers, brakemen, switchmen, clerks

and even engineers, they gave their birthplaces as Canada, Ireland,

Sweden, Germany, eastern states and Minnesota.

In 1880, people weren't expected to be able to read and fill out

in English a census questionnaire. Literate people - almost all of

them men - were hired to go from household to household, asking for

information. But in the train district of St. Paul, Alice T. Williams

was the "enumerator," and on July 6 she wrote of the 210 men, "The

following names are certified to by the officers of the several

railroads as being men in their employ and whose place of abode is St.

Paul, but having no homes, sleeping in cars, &c."

The person who came across that entry 100 years later and who

wished she knew how those men's lives turned out was Jessica Schepers,

24. Coincidentally, one of the next entries on the old St. Paul ledger

she was studying was for the Convent of Visitation - Schepers went to

the convent's junior high school in Mendota Heights. Sister Mary

Clementine and Sister Mary Clare, listed on the 1880 census, were long

gone, of course, but their modern counterparts with similar names were

on hand.

While Schepers was dealing with the homeless railroad workers,

Linda Thompson was working with an extended family of 20 persons in the

southeast Minnesota farming community of Holden, in Goodhue County.

The head of the household was listed as Einert Enison, 41, born in

Norway. He and his Norwegian-born wife, Keri, 35, had six daughters

and no sons. The oldest girl was 11 and listed as having been born in

Minnesota, so the Enisons had been here at least 11 years. With them

lived his mother and father; an unmarried man from Norway listed as a

farm laborer; a 16-year-old girl of Norwegian descent who worked in the

house; Einert's 25-year-old sister; and a family of two adults and five

children, probably Mrs. Enison's relatives, from Norway.

The modern census researchers would have loved to see what the

Enisons' house looked like. If only the census had included photos.

The university's project on the 1880 census is headed by

historians Steven Ruggles and Russell Menard. It's funded by a $1.3

million grant from the National Institutes of Health, which is

interested in the 1880 census partly because questions about health

were asked for the first time. Other universities are evaluating other

censuses.

The U.S. Census was first taken in 1790 and was designed to

apportion Congress, but it also was probably intended to determine how

many young men were available for the army.

Menard said the 1880 census is particularly appealing to

historians. Some call it the first modern census; it broke ground in

its completeness of coverage and the range and detail of questions

asked. For example, it was the first to ask about the marital status of

everyone in a household and their relation to the head.

In 1870 only 6,530 enumerators were used; by 1880, the number was

31,382. A professional staff, trained to gather census information,

was used for the first time in 1880; before that federal marshals and

other government employees were sent out.

The government spent so much money on gathering the 1880 census

that it ran out of funds to compile and evaluate it. In those days, of

course, the hand tabulation necessary to make sense of the data was

time-consuming and expensive. So while the count was of high quality,

"it has been sitting there under-used for a century," Menard said. And

because the 1890 census forms were destroyed by a fire in Washington,

D.C., a few years later, the 1880 census carries extra importance.

The census data was sent to the university in the form of 1,454

reels of microfilm, weighing 700 pounds. The material that the project

will cull will be used by social scientists for decades to come.

It will help advance understanding of social change in such areas

as: household composition (near the end of the 1800s, the proportion of

people living with extended kin may have been higher than any time

before or since); fertility; illness (only the 1880 and 1890 censuses

asked if persons were sick on the day of the census taker's visit;

childbirth was considered an illness), and migration patterns (for the

first time, enumerators asked the birthplace of father and mother as

well as the respondent's).

Jeff Stewart, project coordinator, said the researchers worked out

bugs in the computer program by using hunks of the Minnesota census.

"But Minnesota was a very average, homogenous place in 1880. For a

truer test we needed to go to the 10th Ward of New York City, which had

one of the highest population densities in the world, rivaling Calcutta

then. In New York, there were small tenament houses, four or five

stories high, with 200 people living in them."

The people working on the census project find themselves pulled

into the 1880s. They hear classical music and they wonder if the

composer was listed somewhere in the 1880 census. They hear about

Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist who was originally a slave, and they

realized she was alive for "their" census. They see ornate handwriting,

and they can see the 1880 influence.

Dianne Star keeps a ledger of interesting tidbits she runs into in

the 1880 records. For example, a Colorado mining area had a whorehouse

listing nine female and two male prostitutes. . . . And one Isaiah

Speece of Illinois was described on a census form like this: "This

person is a chronic drunkard and tried in every possible way to prevent

me from obtaining the necessary information." . . . A woman listed her

husband's occupation as "lazy cuss." . . . And an Illinois

16-year-old girl was listed as the mother of a 2-year-old girl; the

child's father, the census taker recorded, was one of the mother's

brothers.

After immersion in the 1880s for months, project members hoped

they could make their mark in history by getting to fill out the long

form for the 1990 census. But except for one, everybody got the short

form. The one is project head Steven Ruggles, who is on sabbatical for

a year at Cambridge University and is therefore illegible to be

counted.

"It's a shame," his colleague Russell Menard said. "We live and

die for the census."