Secrets of the Census, Part 6: 1890

One of the first things genealogists discover is how lucky we are to have two hundred years’ worth of federal censuses to help us. Starting in 1790, our government has collected data on citizens every ten years. After seventy years, that data is made public. The earliest censuses only included male heads of households, but gradually they became more useful to family historians, and we have cruised through the nineteenth century gathering information on our ancestors. We left off our “Secrets of the Census” posts in 1880, and we should be able to dig into the 1890 census next except for its very sad story. Perhaps, like many people, you’ve heard that the 1890 census was lost in a fire. However, that is not quite the case. Here’s what really happened:

In 1890, there was no census bureau, and it was already obvious that important national papers needed to be housed in much safer conditions than were currently being used. No one, however, could find money in the budget for a purpose-built archive, and so storage for important national papers was scattered among several federal office buildings. Perhaps as a harbinger of things to come, in 1896, the special censuses used to collect statistics that had been gathered in 1890 were damaged in a fire, but the general population schedules were not harmed. The secretary of commerce and other archivists asked for better housing conditions for the remaining censuses, but to no avail. 

In 1921, “the schedules could be found piled in an orderly manner on closely placed pine shelves in an unlocked file room in the basement of the Commerce Building.” Late in the afternoon of 10 January 1921, a fire began in that basement. Five hours later, by the time exhausted firemen finished dousing the flames, they opened the windows and left all of the drenched papers in ankle-deep water. At the time, they estimated that about a quarter of the documents were actually destroyed, but others were waterlogged, smoke-damaged, and charred.

(Library of Congress photo of the fire; public domain)

Here’s where more trouble began. Estimates of salvaging the remaining papers ranged from a month to a few years. Nothing could happen, though, until insurance companies could evaluate the damage. As people argued about what started the fire, who was to blame, and the need for a National Archives, the soggy papers were packed up and placed into storage. No one knows for sure what transpired over the next decade, but the boxes of moldy papers were stored out of sight until some time in 1932, when a list of items deemed ready for destruction was sent to Congress, and that was the end of the 1890 census.

What Was Left?

If there is any good news about this census, it is that some fragments were not destroyed. 

• A tiny portion of the population schedules remain from a few random states and counties; none from Missouri, but Mound Township, McDonough County, Illinois, as well as a few other states. 
• There are some schedules of Union veterans and widows of Union veterans from about 50% of the state of Kentucky to the remaining states that follow Kentucky alphabetically. 
• There are Oklahoma territorial schedules. 
• Some lists of African Americans in Delaware remain.
• Some Lutheran Synod data is available.

This fire-damaged page of the 1890 census, from McDonough County, Illinois, shows the information collected on the 1890 population schedule. You can search what is left of the 1890 census on FamilySearch and Ancestry. You may want to start with the FamilySearch wiki to learn what exists. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/United_States_Census_1890

And more good news . . .

It was the disastrous fire that ruined the 1890 federal census that finally spurred preservationists into action. One day before Congress authorized the destruction of the remaining fire-damaged census, then-president Herbert Hoover lay the cornerstone on the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. It was completed in 1937.

Additional Resources

"First in the Path of the Firemen: The Fate of the 1890 Population Census,” by Kellee Blake, spring 1996, volume 28, no. 1, Genealogy Notes from Prologue Magazine, on the NARA website, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census 

An accounting of what’s left of the census is on the National Archives website, https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1890#gensched

“History and the Census: 1890 Census Fire,” by Jason G. Gauthier, 1 April 2021, United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/about/history/stories/monthly/2021/january-2021.html