DOI: 10.3886/icpsr07568.v1
title: United States Southern Cities in 1870 and 1880: A Study of Individuals and Families
title: Version 1

description: This data collection contains individual-level and family-level information collected from the 1870 and 1880 manuscript schedules of the United States Population Census for seven Southern cities: Charleston, South Carolina, Richmond, Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia, Savannah, Georgia, Mobile, Alabama, Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Approximately 5,000 individuals and 1,500 families are represented for each of the two census years studied. Part 1 contains data for 1870, and Part 2 contains data for 1880. The data gathered for sampled individuals include age, sex, race, marital status, presence of health defect, school attendance, ability to read, ability to write, occupational classification (female and male), nationality, and real and personal wealth (for 1870 only). Both datasets include a variable that uniquely identifies each family in the sample to facilitate the aggregation of the data for the creation of family-level data for each member, e.g., sex, race, age, marital status, school attendance, member status in the family, occupation, health, unemployment, city of residence, nationality and parents' nationality, and real and personal wealth.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: 1870 Data 
 DS2: 1880 Data
description: In each file, Variables 1-4, 25, and 60 are for identification. Variables 5-24 pertain to the over 10,000 individuals and are presented basically as provided by the principal investigator. Variables 25-59 pertain to the over 3,000 families and were created by ICPSR staff by aggregating or redefining the individual-level data into composite variables for the entire family, or for the head only as the representative of the family. The individual and family data were then merged, producing the two final files. Both files have the same number of variables with identical numbering. Comparable variables for the two years were calculated with identical methods. If data existed for one year and not the other, a dummy variable was inserted as a placeholder for the year without data.
The principal investigator and ICPSR wish to emphasize that the 35 family-level variables included here are not meant to be the only composite variables that could be created. Each researcher may find it necessary to create additional variables specific to his or her particular research project. These family-level variables are intended to assist researchers in their preliminary analyses of these data, and may be used or enlarged upon at the discretion of each researcher.
description: Individuals and families in Charleston, South Carolina, Richmond, Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia, Savannah, Georgia, Mobile, Alabama, Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1870 and 1880.
description: One out of every 50 pages of the 1870 and 1880 manuscript censuses for Charleston, South Carolina, Richmond, Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia, Savannah, Georgia, Mobile, Alabama, and Norfolk, Virginia, and one out of every 200 pages for New Orleans, Louisiana, were sampled to gather the individual-level data.