IN THE CENSUS

#52Ancestors  

The week five challenge of #52 Ancestors is "In The Census."     

     We lived in Guadalajara, Mexico through 2000, when a census taker came around to our house. Yes, even Mexico has a Census. My husband didn’t want to answer their questions due to his concerns over privacy and living in a foreign country with only a legal tourist visa. However, as a genealogist who has found census records invaluable in my own research, I insisted we answer their questions.

        Then in 2010, I worked for the U.S. Census as a quality control clerk in the local office which was over the county and surrounding towns not included in the Metropolitan Tucson area. This included Native American/Indian Reservations. One of the things I learned was that the government, is not well enough organized to use census information gathered to use “against” its citizens. With the improvements in GPS global tracking, this may well not be the case in 2020. The only people our census takers went to in person were those who did not fill out their questionnaire and return them. If you don’t want to be bothered in person, just mail it in! Only one randomly selected person out of 100 was asked more extensive questions as a sample for income, etc. This started in earlier census years like 1940, where whoever appeared in the two lines bold marked on preprinted census record sheets were asked additional questions and their answers appeared at the bottom of that page.

      Now to answer your question…”Was reading the 2010 census takers handwriting easier?” No Even though they printed and didn’t us cursive, the computer often couldn’t read their letters and numbers, because Optical Character Recognition software was still in its early stages and even with lessons on how to form each character, the people didn’t write them correctly! LOL

     I may go ahead and post here each week even though it may not be about my move to Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico and our life there until 2001, but it seems that I am not blogging like I should and this may be just the motivation I need to keep posting here. No one reads it or follows or comments, so it will be fun to see if someone actually does come to see this through #52Ancestors.