Rocal

Due dates

Due by 6pm on Monday, 26 September. I suggest you get started soon by talking to your family to find out identifying secret information like “maiden” names and how old grandma really is

How: Electronic submission. We’ll have final information to you by the 21st of September — it will either be via Moodle, Google Drive, or plain old email …

Please put your name in the names of the files you are submitting! Thanks

If your name is Ima Student your files would be named

ima student.doc

ima student.jpg

Please check with us ahead of time if you will be sending something other than Microsoft Office or Open Office files, just to make sure we’ll be able to open the file.

Contribution to your grade: This assignment counts for 10% of your grade in SOC3511.

Goals for this assignment: This assignment is designed to help you develop your skills at

· Working with primary research sources

· Contextualizing information about specific individuals and localities through comparison to larger groups

· Using information from the United States census (useful for many classes in the social sciences, and potentially in your future employment)

Instructions

1. Find one member of your family in the United States census for 1940 using

· Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org (searchable by name)

· National Archives and Records Administration to browse by location. I only recommend this if you know precisely where your ancestors were living, or have a deep interest in examining many pages of old census returns

If you do not have ancestors who were resident in the United States in 1940, you have two options. You can 1) search for the ancestors of a friend, or 2) Let me know by Friday, 9 September and I will provide you (by 14 September) with the vital details of some actual families that you will be able to find.

Please turn over for more instructions

Save the image(s) of the census forms on which you find the household of your family members. If your family is at the bottom of a page their household will continue onto a second page.

2. Submit the image(s) along with a page of writing responding to the following prompts.

1. List the household number (column 3) and line numbers (left and right edge) of sheet that correspond to your family members

2. What identifying information did you use to find your ancestor?

3. Did you have any difficulties finding your ancestor? For example, did you initially try to locate someone else and switch to the person you are reporting on? Was what you knew about your ancestor from family members today consistent with what was reported on the census?

4. What was the most interesting or surprising thing you learned about your ancestor from the census?

5. Looking at your ancestor’s household in comparison to other households on the same page (and perhaps surrounding pages), how were your ancestors similar to and different from their neighbors? [Hint: look down a column. Were most people born in similar places, doing similar jobs, were all living there 5 years ago? Or were the neighbors diverse?]

6. Select one variable (question) that you are particularly interested in.

7. Now, using either Historical Statistics of the United States or the US Census Bureau website, find out something about the place your ancestor lived in 1940. You can define the “level” of geography yourself, city, county, or state (smaller areas like neighborhoods are more problematic across time). In 2-3 sentences describe your area, and compare it to the same information for the United States.

8. Pick another census year from 1960 onwards and

a. Find the same information about the same place. How did the area your ancestor lived in change?

b. Find the same information about the United States. How did the United States change?

Resources for Historical Statistics of the United States: [Library: Databases: H]