Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

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For All in Search of Skeletons, U.S. Opened Its Closet at Midnight

" 'I want to see if he was living with his second wife, Dora, or if he had gone off and married another woman without divorcing her,' Mr. Leclerc said shortly before the microfilm was made public at the stroke of midnight. 'He was married five times that I know of, four times I can prove and as many as seven times to hear my relatives talk.'

Such were the prickly personal questions that brought genealogy buffs out during vampire hours here and across the country for the unveiling of information on individuals and families gathered in the 1930 census. Under federal law, this data, which, most juicily, discloses who was living with whom and in what dwelling, is kept secret for privacy reasons until 72 years have come and gone....

The 1930 census asked 32 questions of 123 million people. Those questions included, ``language spoken in home before coming to the United States,'' relationship of individuals to the head of the family (wives were designated by the initial H, which stood for homemaker) and, for the first time, whether there was a radio in the home. Nineteen thirty was the last time all Americans answered the same questions in a census and the last time all homes were visited by a census taker." [NY Times]

Except if you're Mickey Mouse, I guess. Then you're still under lock and key.

Too bad its not online, but then I suppose they would have run into the same problems the British did with the 1901 census of England and Wales. I hope online access is coming down the road, although I don't see any mention of the new data anywhere on the U.S. Census Bureau web site.

comments < 7:33:56 PM        >

Rob Fahrni visioizes DJ's diagram.  [Scripting News]
comments < 7:31:48 PM        >

Jon Udell's piece on Instant Outlining is available on O'Reilly. "It's been clear to me for a long while that the only thing that might displace email would be some kind of persistent IM. That's exactly what instant outlining is. If it catches on, and it's buzz-worthy enough to do that, we'll have a framework within which to innovate in ways that email never allowed." [Scripting News]
comments < 7:31:08 PM        >

Charles Eicher is streaming QuickTime from his Radio desktop. Coool-oh.  [Scripting News]
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