The inventor of punched cards, which led to the first computers and companies like IBM, was aiming to solve a gnarly problem at the time: data collection for the census. The U.S. Constitution requires ...

1890: The U.S. Census Bureau uses a tabulating machine for the first time. Freed of the laborious process of hand-sorting its data, the bureau is able to produce a complete census within two years.

As genealogists eagerly await release of the U.S. Census of 1950 (due out in April, 2022), let’s take another of our occasional looks at a key census of the past. Today, we’ll examine the “vanished” ...

The U.S. Constitution requires that a population count be conducted at the beginning of every decade. This census has always been charged with political significance, and continues to be. That’s clear ...

Possiblity of a reconsideration of that part of the Johnson Immigration Bill which fixes as a basis for quotas the 1890 census, increases daily. It now appears that the House Immigration Committee has ...

Commissioned by the United States Census Bureau to make counting people easier, the device would lead to the creation of IBM After the United States Census Bureau dispatched its workers across the ...

“I am incensed,” Mayor Douglas Gunn responded on Saturday when the census figure of 15,700 for San Diego was mentioned. “I shall write to the census authorities and the Secretary of Interior demanding ...

On January 10, 1921 a fire in the basement of the Department of Commerce in downtown Washington, D.C., destroyed most of the 1890 census records. One reason the records could not be saved was that ...

In April, the Supreme Court began to hear arguments about one of the central requirements of the Constitution. It’s right there, in Article I, Section 2, clause 3: For a government of the people to ...