Census Reporter



We love using the state and US Federal censuses – filled with information. Now online is a special site to help you make a little more sense of the info in the census especially related to the people in the family hometown. It won’t answer all your questions about your grandparents, but will provide insight to their hometown today. It does not go back decades but rather provides current information.

Census Reporter is a Knight News Challenge-funded project to simplify finding and using data from the decennial census and the American Community Survey. Start at the top and type in a hometown name. Use just the abbreviations for the states.

Up will appear a map outlining the town’s boundaries and neighboring locations. The town’s population, a graph breakdown of age of the population, races, economic income, number of households, education, value of homes, as well as the number of veterans and numbers from specific wars are just some of the 15 topics. This data is compared to neighboring towns and to the state figures.

census-manchester

I searched using Census Reporter a family hometown of Manheim, PA. A tiny town even today with just 4,867 population. Interesting to learn of its population, housing and ethnic make-up. The same was true of Manchester, MD, even smaller with a population of 4,750. These were the hometowns of numerous ancestors on my mother’s side. I never lived in these locations, but from the research I have done over the years, my ancestors were some of the community leaders and business people in each town.

Related information on FamilyTree.com genealogy blog links:

Small Towns News

Ancestor’s Hometown

 

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