The 2020 U.S. Census has arrived, with no regard to the world it was born into but inevitably tied to it. I winced at the thought of filling it out electronically, but as we all suddenly found ourselves quarantined in our homes, the decision to abandon paper forms has proven to be prescient.
Coincidentally, I was in the midst of sifting through census records from 19th century France, trying to piece together family history that had been abandoned in the fields of time. When once I had to physically travel to an archival library in an obscure French city, I can now virtually flip through documents without the pressure of repressive closing times or travel expenses. That forgotten family stories can be excavated from censuses alone speaks volumes to the power of numeration.
It’s easy to look at the census as just a form, a federal obligation like filing taxes. Yet unlike receiving an unexpected refund, there is no obvious reward to answering a periodic questionnaire. In the United States, census records are under lock and key for seventy-two years, never intended to be seen by those who appear on it except a fortunate few.
The data seems insignificant on its own: your name, age, place of residence, the people you lived with at the time. Only with the passage of time does the foundation of your story emerge: your movements, domestic relationships, children — decennial checkpoints that could motivate a future armchair historian.
My great-grandfather came from a small farm town in eastern France and immigrated to the US when he was a child. As his name was americanized from Aristide to Harry, so disappeared his french heritage and ancestral history beyond a few fragments. Over a century later, I sifted through the town records, tracing Harry’s father from birth to death, uncovering the same for his siblings, his wife, his parents, even his neighbors.
I think of my own story, aware of what my census appearances include as much as they leave out. Born in Chicago, lived briefly in Los Angeles, settled in New York — neglecting the fact that I went to university in NYC before heading west, or spent time in Cape Town before abandoning LA. I’ll argue that the census doesn’t accurately tell my tale, nor my parents’. And so must be the same for my agrarian ancestors, who apparently never went anywhere until one decided to buy a one-way ticket to Nevada.
The 2020 Census will make no mention of the COVID-19 pandemic; many of the 330 million names documented now will sadly be gone long before 2030. France’s quinquennial census of 1872 makes no mention of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, which ended the year before and threw off the record-keeping; but when compared with that of 1866, something clearly shook even the tiniest of towns.
Ultimately, it’s up to future historians to decide the value of our census records. Perhaps descendants will come looking for us; perhaps we will be entirely forgotten. Until then, there’s no harm in answering a few questions and making our existence known on the permanent record.