 Hello! Welcome to everyone out there watching us on YouTube. I'm so glad that you are here joining us at the National Archives online. I wish we could be there in person, but I'm so happy to be able to talk with so many of you right now. I'm Dan Bauch. I'm the author of the book, Democracy's Data, the Hidden Stories in the US Census. I'm here with Maude Newton, the author of Ancestor Trouble, a Reckoning and a Reconciliation. Which was published earlier this year, I think in March. So I want to allow me a moment here, before we begin, to explain what brings the two of us together with all of you. Visitors to the National Archives in Washington DC often, at least I always, would go in through museum entrance on one side of the building. But then many people who are set to research go in around the other side of the building. And to do that, they pass by these two, I think of them as centuries, these statues. One that enjoins us to study the past, and the other that says what is past is prologue. As I passed through these centuries, many, many days to work on and research this book, I often thought of these two enjoinders. I'm studying the past, but understanding the past, in this case the past of the nation, as a thing which will help inform and help me think about what the nation's future is, where I fit with my fellow Americans in this story. I also noticed that I was joined in the stream of people past these centuries. By many folks who were also researching, they were researching often the pasts of their families. And for them too, I think, the study of the past is a way of understanding themselves and their future as well, their families going into the future. We're all there to study the past. We all believe that the past is prologue. In Ancestor Trouble, this book, Mod Newton explores her own family history to better understand herself, but also is looking to understand how and why so many people try to understand their family histories. Why, at this particular moment, people engage with, seek after, honor, fight with, or reconcile with their ancestors. So I want to read a couple passages from this book to help set the stage. So you have a sense of where Mod is coming from, and I think she'll do a little bit of the same to give a sense of where I'm coming from. So on page 21 of her book, she writes, A family tree is like a lenticular print. Its most prominent features shift depending on the viewer's perspective. And while many of us who practice genealogy are drawn to the ancestors we admire, whose intelligence or talents or beauty or station we'd like to share, many of us are also in dialogue with those we ardently want not to resemble, whose traits we see in ourselves and wish we didn't, or don't acknowledge in ourselves, but should. Villains may fascinate us, those abandoned to instructions may haunt us, institutions may haunt us, mysteries may consume us. For me, and for a not insignificant number of family history buffs, flawed people are more interesting than those who led decorous lives. So this passage spoke to me as I think it reveals this interest that Mod has and that I have as well, in not just seeing the lives of the past as the pretty ones, but in embracing the messiness of the past, the messiness of folks in the past, and also recognizing a certain amount of intrigue, drama, excitement, fascination in our engagement with historical records. When the other two lines I want to read, one is from page 20 in which Mod writes, piecing together a family's lineage from this perspective can be humbling, a way of understanding oneself as a small part of a continually evolving whole. And then on page 30, the stories we tell ourselves about our ancestors have the power to shape us, in some ways, nearly as much as our genetics do. And here I felt, as I read these lines, just a deep kinship immediately with their author, thinking about how important it is not only to study the past, what has happened, but how much these stories we tell about the past, about ourselves and our place in the past, shape who we are as individuals, families, communities, and a nation. So when it seemed possible that I could get Mod to join me here at the National Archives, the site of these records that we so share and one of the repositories of our nation's history and our family's histories, I didn't think she could possibly say yes, but she did. And so I want to stop my screen share so we can see both of us more fully. I want to thank Mod for being here. Dan, thank you so much for inviting me to be here. As you know, I also feel that our books are in such interesting conversation with each other. And I have so much admiration for what you've done here. For those who haven't yet had the pleasure of reading democracy's data, Dan focuses on the 1940 census in particular. He does talk about other prior census sets. And this was written, you know, over a number of years before the 1950 census was released. And he really, really delves in there. And I'm just going to give you a little taste of one of the sections that really speaks to me. You know, as I did, Dan talks a little bit about his own family in the early chapters of the book and what he discovered about some of his own ancestors, their income, for example, from the 1940 census and some other details that were maybe a little less surprising to him. But, you know, I wanted to just sort of tie this into what Dan was saying about how our individual stories come together, you know, in this data and, you know, more broadly, all the stories that aren't captured by the data. And so I want to just read something he wrote about what he calls the doorstep encounter, which was when the census taker back in the day would go around to each and every home and have to fit each person or family or collection of people in a structure into the form that was prescribed. The doorstep is the nexus where the best laid plans for an orderly census process encounter a profoundly complicated reality. Focusing on the doorstep and the data produced there rather than on the data in its tabulated numerical form quickly disabuses us of any notion that the making of data can be segregated from social dynamics or political forces. At the doorstep negotiations are had and tweaks are made as reality becomes data on its way toward becoming numbers and facts. These negotiations and tweaks aren't beside the point. They should not be forgotten. They have so much to tell us about our nation too. They're part of the data. That's why we should bother to read for stories in the data. That's why I wrote this book. When we settled for studying only the official numbers released in the immediate wake of a census we also settle for the democracy that such account can sustain. Our democracy is only as good as our data and our data is only as good as our democracy. Readers will by the time they have turned the final page of this book see census data differently and realize that one path to achieving a more equitable and inclusive country involves thinking deliberately and strategically about the census questions we campaign for, the answers we give, the uses of the census we allow, and the values we inscribe in the entire process of manufacturing the nation's data. The census concerns us all. What does it say about us that these are our data, that this is what we seek to know? So I think, you know, most of us who are family history buffs, as I obviously am having written an entire book on the subject, begin with the individual census data sheets from those doorstep encounters. And, you know, maybe we know, you know, assuming we've grown up with our biological parents where we know their identity, you know, we begin perhaps with their parents. Maybe we already know the names of their parents' parents. And we work our way back, you know, in my case there was one line that I really didn't know that much about, but my grandfather, my mother's father was said to have married 13 times. His father was said to have killed a man with a hay hook. And so obviously I was very curious about this part of my family. And so through the census, you know, we can learn basic facts about our ancestors. I was able to learn my grandfather's father's name, which I hadn't known. I learned exactly where he lived, which was not quite in Dallas, Texas, which is what I had thought, but a little bit outside of Dallas. And I could verify that he was a farmer. So, you know, these are the kinds of things that were accustomed to learning from the census, the recent census. And if we're white and if our ancestors have been here for a while, you know, we may be able to trace it back further in the census. Sometimes really surprisingly intimate details can emerge from this data. And Dan and I will dive into that in a little bit. You know, but as he details in the book, the 1940 census purported to capture income. And so the fear that erupted around that question was not dissimilar to some of the fear that we've seen around COVID masking, for example, concerns about government intrusion. Sometimes we find that our ancestors may be outright lied to the census taker to make themselves look better or to obfuscate some strange fact about the family. As in the case of people of Mexican descent in the 1940 census, sometimes whole categories of people are essentially erased. So a decision had been made by our, you know, white-centered culture to categorize all people of Mexican descent as white. So in the 1940 census, Mexican as a category is not allowed. And of course, going further back, as many of us are aware, there are documents like the appalling slave schedules in which people of African descent are identified only by biological sex and age under the name of their enslaver. And so, you know, we can see so much in the census, so much of our individual history and our collective history. And there's really, there's so much in this book to think about, including how queer people made their families seen all these years later. And so I wanted to turn it over to Dan to just talk about how he became interested in the census as a subject. Thank you, Maude. Individual history and collective history. I really like that way of framing and thinking about what just as we look at one of these census sheets, what you can see. And I think together you and I are going to look at some of the census sheets later and maybe try that out. I did not believe I was going to write a book about the U.S. census. So I am a historian by profession and my, if I had to label the kind of history I do, one way of saying it is that I'm a historian of personal data that I'm interested in how and why usually states or large institutions or corporations produce categories or ways of thinking about how a person can be made into a data system. The kind of thing that now feels like it's very, very new. Like all of a sudden we've been Facebooked into a new kind of existence. But in fact is the story of modern life. Ever since there have been modern institutions we have had people being turned into data and the census indeed is one of those really central institutions for that process. But so I was investigating something entirely different. I was interested in the history of questions about demography. I was writing what I thought might be a book that didn't turn into a book about the idea of the baby boom. How and why folks because they started to imagine and create these models that assumed that America had reached maturity that from here on in the population was just going to level off how when they turned out to be wrong and in fact population just kept growing. But as this first happened they then said, oh good heavens then these the first group of people that are born they're they're an anomaly. They're a bulge. They're a problem which then this argument carries through for generations as in a kind of explanation or for decades explanation for why it is that things keep failing and it's blamed on these people and this false assumption rather than on kind of all kinds of other choices that are made in government. But so I was looking for a woman scientist named Alberti Foudre. I had found her in doing some of this research and she was this person who I wish showed up more in democracy's data. She was by far the best mathematician in the Census Bureau in the 1920s and 1930s. I saw frequently that these really big important names in people like Alfred Latke who's kind of central to us a whole variety of different mathematical disciplines would constantly say already I'm going to show up in DC and I'm going to talk to Miss Foudre and yet I knew very little about her. I'd never read anything about her and I knew she worked for the Census Bureau so I went to the National Archives looking for Alberti Foudre. I found some really interesting things about her and indeed she was far and away the most talented mathematician in the Census Bureau but because of her sex was they never gave her position of authority that was in line with her expertise and in fact hired a guy to take her to places that she'd actually which was effectively the work she'd been doing for 20 years. So it's a tragic story on that level as I was looking at for her finding this I was piecing through all of these records for the 1940 Census that she was in there for and around and was at that moment in the archives as I kind of looked around me and and I kept seeing all of these what I kept seeing was people enumerators saying I wasn't paid enough and as a historian whatever I see people see like people complaining about things I think there might be a story and what that said to me was I had always looked at these census sheets as maybe a way to find out a fact about an individual but I had never thought about how on the other side of that sheet was also this enumerator and that in turned out there were 120,000 of these enumerators who had gone out and that each one of these records was not a fact about a person but it was a inscription of a conversation it was a registration of two people interacting in some way and suddenly the text seemed different and the other thing that I noticed or kind of I thought about was genealogy and family history weren't what I thought they were so as a historian I'm my most of what I learned about genealogy family history was thinking about a kind of 19th century genealogical institutions the purpose of which were largely to enforce ideas about kind of nativist primacy or white supremacy. I thought I think of the daughters of the American Revolution keeping Marian Anderson from singing a Constitution Hall in the early 20th century but then as I looked around and I thought about what I've been what I've been hearing from people who were doing family history and genealogical work was that this was no longer true about who was doing family history and that really intrigued me the sense that maybe I could write a book that could be useful in some way to not just tell this this this national story but they would would kind of try to bring these two things together. So I mean I'm reading a book I felt like I learned a great deal but I wonder if you could maybe tell us a little bit about your sense of what is happening in family history or genealogy these days. Yeah, definitely and one thing that I just wanted to flag for those who are listening and viewing us here is you know Dan's book I mean he does everything that he sets out to do that he just also really sets the census in an important political and political movement and all of the sort of machinations about how the census was set up you know how enumerators were chosen and Mississippi for example and and that's sort of an interesting segue for me so you know I alluded earlier to this sort of I think of them as the juicer side of my family the you know the grandfather who allegedly married 13 times and I must confess I have to date found a mere 10 marriages to nine women you know and his father who had allegedly killed a man with a paper and for many years I discovered that was true but he wasn't the sort of sloshed up playing drunk villain I had envisioned he was actually a very sympathetic character based on what I uncovered but you know sort of on the other side of my family my father unfortunately is a rather extreme white so you know he grew up in the Mississippi Delta I know many people grow up in the Mississippi Delta who do not hold it but he because our ancestors had enslaved people in the Mississippi Delta he felt that slavery should never have been discontinued and that it was inherently correct and so on the one side of my family I had this sort of text in the ground is larger than life ancestors and then on the other side I had that I think unlike a lot of people whose families you know participated in this battle slavery by enslaving black people I didn't have the ability to pretend that or sort of away from it because it was very primary in my home this sort of my father's racism as a as a guiding principle and his explicit and so that was another part of what drew me to this data you know wanting to understand what what did my ancestors do how involved were they in this you know to some degree I hoped that I would find that you know their involvement was minimal and that's not what I found you know to this day I still have not uncovered all of my ancestors and so you know the census has been really the primary tool that I have used to uncover these and I think you know so I think they're on the one hand there are people who are just sort of looking for that sort of connection to their ancestors there you know this this sort of desire that I really empathize with you feel a sense of connection to claim something you know about these human beings whose bodies created ours right but on the other hand the census how our ancestors were in relation to what was happening in the larger whether our ancestors enslaved other human being you know if our ancestors you know I to my surprise discovered I was descended from an accused witch in Northampton, Massachusetts but then I also discovered that her husband my ninth great-grandfather was instrumental in killing and displacing the people of that region and so you know his near presence there even leaving aside the details of the earth you know suggests that kind of relationship and so you know I think that there's there's a spectrum you know of people who are drawn to genealogy and sometimes it is very very personal and limited to that and for me that's how it began but the more I learned the more curious I became about the country as a whole and the larger world and other human beings insisted at that time and so I think a lot of times there's a conversation about genealogy in and I see that argument but on the other hand I think it's actually kind of a doorway or a doorstep moment to you know to something that you know it has a lot more meaning and creates a potential within the searcher and in the culture at large for thinking about how we want things to be going forward and I think now we really wanted to nerd out a little bit and I think you have some some sense of she I do here I'll share my screen again and while I'm doing that I will let's see I will note that that door is speaking of that as a doorstep moment I think is really appropriate to think about our own that this the sense of sheets are place us at this doorstep alongside these individuals and one of the things that is I have to just catch myself because it's easy to romanticize that doorstep moment and to imagine often kind of think about this I think of the census is this amazingly important democratic institution it exists to ensure that there is a fair distribution of power amongst the states that each individual theoretically she will be recognized from the very beginning we know that that that was an ideal that was more positive than actually operated fully so we know that when the census was first put in place was put in place alongside language of the Constitution that did not count any American Indians Native Americans that counted as three-fifths of a person all enslaved people as part of a complicated bargain between southern and northern states and so this the basic principle this ideal each person will count on the census and then by being counted we can fairly distribute power was was there from the beginning but is often operated in the breach is kind of a struggle we continue to go after as a society as a nation but so when I when I think about these encounters these doorstep moments kind of to the point of a mod talking about thinking back and encountering our ancestors in the past sometimes these could have been really nice moments indeed we have all of these stories that since bureau is very happy to share this is why I know about them in which enumerators are asked in for tea or given dinner or in fact have so many different invitations to dinner that they have to choose amongst them and so I like that these the idea of this doorstep encounter as a friendly neighborly moment but to mods point also there's a lot of suspicion so when folks for instance what we might talk about income in here as we look at some of these sheets but one of the reason the nineteen forty census income question was so controversial was surprising to me I thought that what I was going to find was the people were concerned primarily about big brother this is before big brother had meant to yet but that it's about central oversight by the federal government looking at and understanding this information and yet then what I found was people who would write to this case a senator who is leading the charge against the income question and there's one letter that I meant I find it a little bit kind of hilarious but it which maybe is not appropriate but it in which a widow writes to the senator and says I make something like two hundred and sixty two dollars a month she says exactly what it is I just can't remember and I don't want the government to know and she writes this to her senator and I just my head kind of explodes at that moment because of course she's writing it to her senator the government knows but she what becomes clear from her letters and from many other letters that came out at the same time is that it was less that they were concerned about the central government to the federal government knowing this they didn't want their neighbors to know and the numerator coming to their door was likely to be a neighbor and some somebody from a different kind of political position and there was a great deal of distrust so we have this we often folks have this vision of like the past as being a place for people trusted one another and lived in small communities and small communities were just as full of concern and distress and interpersonal tension as they are today and so it was really interesting to see the way in which that kind of privacy concern manifested as a concern with about other folks there so these whenever we encounter these doorsteps whether it's doorsteps back to our ancestors doorsteps to a new data system or doorsteps to seeing these innumerators talking to individuals I think of them as moments in which there might be happiness there could be creativity as people work together but there could and it probably often was conflict tension maybe even outright hostility between the folks who are kind of putting this together so yes I'm going to start us with this sheet which this was one and I talked about it at half time we thought that this might be a good place to start mod you want to lay out what's interesting here yeah I mean I'll let you dig into the specifics but you know one thing that I was literally asking you in this book you know and again where it is is that Dan you know uncovered this really interesting use of the disadvantage of work so instead of identifying someone as a spouse identifying you know someone as a child or order or you know some people were designated and you know we'll get into this a bit more but you know it was in some ways a catch-all term for certain kinds of living arrangements and it varied to some extent by geography to Dan's point about the dance point about how I've gotten a note that my audio is shaky so I'm going to fix that a little bit here so yeah so so to Dan's point about geography the you know the ways that the term was used really varied depending on region but it was used in the way that we've become more accustomed to it being used these days to designate beer couples and I found it you know Dan talking about his own family toward the end of the book was really poignant but I was hoping that you could sort of describe the use of partner here it looks like you have one of the West Village or thereabouts sheets. Yeah, that's right. So this is thank you for that setup. This is Greenwich Village. The enumerator is I think I should know this I think it says Lillian Rita Davis who is walking through this neighborhood and as we as you as you look through these census records so we and this is I think is a neat example too of thinking about how we tell the stories about our past so as these enumerators wander through these communities they were required to not only enumerate individuals but every census is really and this is going to be clear to a lot of folks who have put these records a household census a person only counts if it can be fit into a household they have to be in relationship then to now it's person one but at that point there would be a head of household and it isn't explicitly the rules make it explicit that it's a patriarchal system so the assumed head will be a male and then the assumed spouse is going to be a wife and so you see that in this column label number eight little ways in there it says sister had wife had had had had so these are individuals living alone had brother had had a wife had wife had wife son had wife had wife had had partner had had daughter so it was that partner one that caught me and a friend pointed this out to me and asked me to like what this meant what this partner meant and of course with with my I thought I mean nowadays we say partner I mean I might say I'm a partner in crime but most of the time a partner might mean it in some I'm intimate with someone I live with someone I might be in a romantic relationship with and it's often especially has come to be so widely used because of a way in which queer households can find a way to identify themselves or make themselves eligible so I thought well maybe then I'd never run into a partner what if I start with communities that I know had large gay populations or queer communities in and see if they see more partners there and so we know from looking at kind of the large the population at large in 1940 that collecting all of these these inscriptions this wasn't done by the Census Bureau but it's been done by researchers since then that partners as a whole show up as far less than one percent of the entire population so you'd expect if partners were evenly distributed they'd only show up every once in a while it turns out though in just for instance this one Greenwich Village neighborhood there were I think 12 partners there were a ton of partnerships significantly higher percentage and then throughout in New York in San Francisco and some other places too along the border with Mexico in Hawaii there's significantly higher proportions of people who are labeled partner and and so I don't know ultimately what we're looking at here so this these sheets this first sheet the first partner I talked about we see James Wynn and Richard Smith James Wynn we can find out over here they're both identified as white men in there looks like middle 30s and they both work for the police department so in this case this is a detective and a patrolman living together and they're using partner as a way of understanding their relationship we don't know if this means that they're in a romantic relationship this could be essentially a way in which they're understanding roommates and one of the things that I think is so interesting about thinking about this as a conversation is also we don't know whether partner was a category that they would have held as important to them or one that Lillian Rita Davis walking through a cure community community came to understand was useful to her as she tried to figure out what do I do with all of these households that aren't man and wife which is what the the sheet seems to imply or want things to be and then if we look down a little bit further we find a couple of two people identified as women as a white female in their 40s Lee Lustgarden at the very bottom with the secretary and the industry is liquor and then on the next page the next page is her partner Tessie Finger who is implausibly a municipal stenographer which just feels like the perfect name and again Lee Lustgarden and Tessie Finger is ultimately a kind of mystery and I thought this would be a little bit interesting to talk with a lot about how it is we encounter these mysteries but we see certainly a sense that in these queer communities the partner becomes this important means by which people can be at least temporarily enumerated the kind of final thing to say about this is just that while it's true that this was a useful tool for counting people when it came time to actually produce the facts about America then all of these partners are erased so they're all lumped in together under a larger umbrella term of the larger and they become so up until 9 2012 when these records were all revealed there were no partners in the story of America and it's only now in writing this book for instance that I'm able to start to tell the story of what a partnership meant or what it meant to be a partner in the census back in 1940 so I don't know if you want to respond to any of that or think with any of these stories with me or just even just think about how it is we deal with the kinds of mysteries that these sheets reveal to us. Yeah, I mean it's really fascinating and I want to confirm the story that I like you know but yeah you're you're so right but we can't really you know but one thing that I sort of carry forward here is your observations toward the end about how queer people wow sort of strategize to use the terminology of the census in a way that makes it possible for the reality of their relationships and their lives to be seen and so I do wonder if there was a little bit of a subversive thing going on you know that that you know both the enumerator and the people in the houses wanted to say okay it might be 40 we're here to we're queer you know and it's but you know you also write about the ways in which partner could be a designation you know in homes or buildings where large numbers of the worker work together and you know and other you know sort of information there maybe no other designations right unless we're able to research you know and that ties into I mean I know one of the census sheet my great grandmother and so was the mother of my grandfather who was a lot of people Rindia was the is my great-grandmother and she was the mother of my grandfather who was allegedly married and on this sheet he appears possibly you know that she had had a mystery this is the 1910 census and here in this census they asked the question how many children are living of yours and there's one my grandfather and then they also asked how many children he had given birth to and the answer was two and I really had to sit with that for a while what a what an incredibly intimate fate for me for great-granddaughter to discover about her all these years later you know and I think you really highlight you know the income example with your own grandparent in the book was was really pointing you know when you discovered that they in the 1940 census like so many people you know weren't really making enough to get by and so yeah I think another of the sheets I sent you underscores you know some of the white lies that people might tell oh yes and so here we just saw the larger sheet where we can see the number of children born to rendia and then the number of children living so next to her name we can see so yeah and then in the next sheet my self-given names sake my given my given name is Rebecca but my self-given namesake is mod and so somewhat illegibly here we can see by my great aunt mod who is living with her mother in the 1927 and so at this point I happen to know that mod was divorced from her husband she had gotten married in Illinois and the marriage had not worked out and so she had moved back to the Mississippi Delta and so the story for the 1920 census paper was that great great aunt mod was widowed so that's that's one of many examples that I came across where either mod herself or perhaps her mother someone else in the house was trying to quite a better spin from the standpoint of prevailing custom on the fact and then we can see in the next census like 40 odd is listed as default so you know it's it's interesting to see how people you know try to fit themselves within these facts and the ways that they try to make themselves more powerful and you know one of the things that you get into in the book is the many ways that people try to evade the income question you know I wonder if you wanted to talk about that a little bit but also you know there's there's this issue in Mississippi you know as we discussed you know of race you know of white supremacy and you really dive into that in the book and so you know I know sort of for time we really wanted to talk about how races constructed through the lens of you wow more yama the census employee and you know this was of course in 1940 and you know currently after this census was taken the census would break its own rules and I'll let you take it thank you before I jump into the more yama story I do want to just note that there's a connection I think between the stories you were just telling about those from those census sheets in 1910 1920 1930 at one level it those stories I think help us to remember that when people are in this at this doorstep encounter they are trying to both use the census categories that are available to them but they're to do what to tell a story that's going to be acceptable to the person they're talking with and that's gonna like work in their community and it might even be that what we're seeing here are something like social facts right it might not be that that widowed being a widow was something that was only shared with the census numerator but rather evidence that that rindia was a widowed woman it's for some period of time as a social way of understanding who she was and this is how I often think about what the census does is it shows us what a person was in their community and indeed especially this is very much true for race in which enumerators were given very important instructions and often at this point we now in in 2020 is understood that race is a category that one self enumerates one explains what one's race is and that is the the fact that their Census Bureau records enumerators in the 1940 census often were asked to ascribe race to to make under their own judgment or if they couldn't if they were unsure unsure of the race of the person that they were encountering the in numeric instructions were very clear that they didn't go and like take a blood test or like try to figure this out as a kind of biological or even a historical inquiry it was a social inquiry race when we say today like race is socially constructed this is not necessarily a new fangled idea so much as it is an actual fact about what what happened with race for many many years the Census Bureau said talk to people's neighbors ask them what race is this person like what race do they live as and that will be the proper answer for understanding how a person's race will be interpreted according to these within these existing categories I think the other thing that these stories stories about uh rindia and mod newton oh sorry it was mod sorry it was mod newton who is living as a widow woman um but the story of of the like encountering rindia's story in thinking oh this is a very intimate thing uh it's precisely because in the 20th century the Census Bureau started to ask very intimate questions about women's fertility and biological lives the 1940 census does also have those questions but they're answered asked only of a sample of individuals at the very bottom of this sheet you can see questions that are only asked to a couple people in this whole sheet of individuals and that includes some questions about fertility but those questions like the income question were very contentious and that is why the Census Bureau in the 20th century started to create these rules saying your answers will be held confidential they won't be shared with other government agencies after they're collected they won't be used for taxation purposes which income clearly people are concerned about their income being used for taxation purposes that these numbers won't be used for any kind of charge against you to send you off to war and the the idea was that this will encourage people to as the 1940 Census Bureau slogan was cooperate in the 1940 census war though tended to kind of press against that that claim to confidentiality it happened during World War I and then it happens in World War II and you can see it in a number of different fashions but the the story of Iwo Moriaba I think is really telling here his parents lived in San Francisco when the Roosevelt administration without really any particular evidence decides the Japanese Americans are a danger after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and decides that all Japanese Americans will be removed from the west coast either if they cannot move out barely there will then be placed in concentration camps Moriama's family is able to escape first before that happens they're allowed to leave they come to Washington DC where they live with Moriama in his home Moriama it turns out my colleagues the historian Margot Anderson and William Seltzer discovered is interesting and is important here because he was released at a moment when the Census Bureau not the Census Bureau helped provide tabular data individual not individual data but data about individuals of very fine grained tables of where Japanese Americans lived on the west coast to facilitate that removal and the Census Bureau has since apologized for that action but then after 1942 the laws changed making confidentiality suspending confidentiality requirements temporarily until 1947 and during that period Census Bureau did produce some individual records the killings they promised they would never do and included on those one of those lists was a list of everyone Japanese descent living in Washington DC in 1943 and there was a figure named 65 and a half and it turned out it was Iwau Moriama Moriama was listed as being a Census Bureau employee and my colleagues wondered why is it that Moriama is here at 65 and a half he's the very end of a list it clearly was a late addition and they were thinking about this before the census came out so they speculated well maybe this is about saving a colleague the Census Bureau was trying to keep him out but then finally were forced to put him in there by somebody higher up who realized that he was missing then when the census 1940 census came out we were able to do some more research and here you can see his sheet and I let's see if I've blown it up here Moriama here is listed in this lodging house series of lodgers in Washington DC Washington DC it's important to remember is a segregated place in which African-Americans live in very different neighborhoods and are not supposed to be mixing with white individuals and what we see is the reason that Iwau Moriama did not show up on that first list is because they they look for people of Japanese race and he was coded here as being white which again we could look at as an enumerator error but actually I think it speaks in many really important ways to the way in which race is constructed that one of the reasons Moriama doesn't show up as a Japanese-American is because he's understood as white because he lives in a white boarding house he played on the in the spirit was segregated at this time he played on the white softball team he played in the white bowling league so in a way white was probably the more accurate category to understand in the Jim Crow Washington DC his kind of social place so the Moriama story it both is part of this cautionary tale understanding that if the people who are in charge of the data don't protect confidentiality the kind of terrible ways it can be weaponized against individuals and the story also helps us to understand how it was that race was constructed through these records. And you know there's a question that really ties into this was information from neighbors that was taken as valid so when a neighbor told the enumerator you know in your hypothetical that Bod was widowed or you know maybe the head of the boarding house told the enumerator that Moriama was white was that was that taken you know as fact and you know can you also a second question can you talk a little bit about the delay in release? Yeah I'd like to I'll be happy to talk about both of those things the first one is not only was information from neighbors is valid data but it was often considered important data I think in some situations it was understood as a kind of way of ensuring that people were telling the truth that you could if an enumerator was unsure of a racial categorization for instance they could ask the neighbors is this person is this the right thing for this and so neighbors often did provide important about information that being said one of the reasons people as they kind of wander through census sheets will notice that they don't always go in perfect geographical order right the Census Bureau person wanders around and knocks door to door but often at the very end of the sheets to find a whole bunch of people that should have been earlier because if people aren't home they don't ask the door the Census Bureau then this the enumerator comes back and tries to find them and so as a result there is there's still a basic idea that the individuals household should answer but even if you look at this the screen that I've shared a number of these names have a little star a little mark next to them that indicates that those individuals were interviewed directly so in this case for instance we see Moriyama was interviewed directly by the census enumerator who then judged him to be a white man working as a vital statistician in the Census Bureau Census Department but not everyone is labeled there in which case their information as lodgers must have been was probably given by either a neighbor or more likely by the owner of that lodging house now the these census records become available only after 72 years so that's why the 1950 records as Mon noted a little earlier just became available to the enormous excitement of nerds like us as we're interested to get into these and start to figure out the story that tells about our families about our communities and about the the nation at large and that's 72 year why it's 70 years is an interesting story which we won't really I won't get into here but you can get a little piece of it if you if you pick up the book and it's it's an interesting kind of negotiation again about this this drive to have confidentiality and then this understanding that these records after a certain period of time do become really useful to medical researchers to social scientists and really powerfully that they become important researchers to people studying their families I so we have one more question. So I wanted to thank you again Dan for inviting me to do this with you and I wanted to thank the National Archives for allowing me to do it as well. And I know, you know again the book democracies data you get into this so much more in the book and you spoke about it a bit earlier but I think there's still people are still wondering exactly what the census was used to identify Japanese people who were sent to the camps in World War II. Right, so one of the ways to understand this is that so the Bureau had just completed the census. It was trying to produce them the counts of state populations and other statistics that it was that it needed to prepare. The war comes and Bureau officials are very well they're concerned that they don't either look patriotic enough if they don't support this effort or that they're not going to have any funding and be able to hold on to their people to continue this discooperation and so they make choices that really think they should not have made to be very directly involved in this in the process that they produced lots of different data, but then amongst Japanese then produce very fine-grained data showing in particular neighborhoods where it is the Japanese Americans can be found. So not individual information but very fine-grained aggregate data so that they loan officials from the Census Bureau to go and help use their expertise in tabulation and in statistical work to make that work more efficient and deeply involved in this process. This is why the Census Bureau apologized in 2000 and whenever I talk about this my folks that I work with who are both interested in this sort of history but also interested in making sure the populations continue to be counted today always say and they're right to stress since 1947 this law was reinstated at a very strong level and over the preceding years the protection of confidentiality has been a really important thing that Census Bureau is concerned about and they produced new mechanisms to even try to ensure that this aggregate data at small levels about vulnerable populations won't be released because I believe Census is really important it's a place where everyone should count and these stories I think are important to understand because the data can be weaponized but it's also good to know that people can and should let themselves be counted by other government it's the way in which they get to have a say in our society Thank you so much Dan and thank you everyone for being here in the National Archives and I'll leave you with the last word This has been such a pleasure and really such an honor that you joined me here and an honor to be at the National Archives this place that has provided me with these records but prides all of us and texts these records from fire from age and makes it possible that we continue to tell all these stories so I want to thank you Maude and National Archives and thank you all for spending this time with us