1960 Urban Long Form - Tract Level data

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The CensusCD 1960 Urban Long Form includes data for 22,871 tracts from the urban parts of the country. The US Census Bureau did not fully tract the US until 1990 so there is only data available for the urban areas (or what was urban in 1960).

Also included in this urban file is data for 175 SMSAs (Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas or cities with their surrounding suburbs). The data is also included for the 175 Central Cities without their suburbs.

There are 441 demographics for every tract in the country. In addition there are state and county level data about population, race (white and black), births and births per 1,000 people. The data can be extracted as a comma separated, tab separated, or a dbf file. You can also map the data with our internal mapping software or export it as shapefiles or mid/mif files to use with ESRI's ArcView or MapInfo products.

The source of the data: The data for CensusCD 1960 is the Census Tract Data, 1960: Elizabeth Mullen Bogue File

The data files known as the Census Tract Data, 1960: Elizabeth Mullen Bogue File, were deposited with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) by a deed of gift from Dr. Donald Bogue of The Community and Family Study Center, University of Chicago. The 1960 Census Tract files were originally created by keypunching the data from the printed publications prepared by the Bureau of the Census. The 1960 census tract data reported in the Publications of the US Government (Record Group 287) were manually keypunched by the Community and Family Study Center, under the direction of Dr. Bogue. Much of this work was accomplished by Elizabeth Mullen Bogue, the wife of the principle investigator, Ms. Maggie Gibson, and a number of other students and staff.

Geographic Areas: CensusCD 1960 contains 7 geographic summarization levels, the total number of each level is in parentheses: Nation (1) State (51) County (3,141) Tract (22,871) SMSA (175) Central City (175) and Radius.

1970 Boundaries: 1970 Tract boundaries were created by GeoLytics. There are no map-able boundaries for the SMSA or the Central City because spatial definitions for these areas were not available.

Suppression: 1960 data is sometimes suppressed by the US Census Bureau to protect confidentiality. Data is suppressed if its universe does not meet certain pre-established thresholds. These thresholds are usually between 5 and 15. For example, if the white population in a geographic area is less than 15, the demographics for white population will be suppressed. Smaller geographic areas are more likely to have suppressed data than larger. No data is suppressed at the state level.

Changes Between the 1960 and 1970 or 1980 Census: Geographic areas from the county level and up have changed very little between the 1960 and 1970 or 1980 census. But in areas below the county level (tract), significant changes have occurred, such as tract splits. Tracts do not cover 100% of the geographic areas in 1960, or even in 1970 or 1980, as they do in 1990 and 2000. Tracts in 1960 are found solely in urban areas.

To protect confidentiality in 1990, data was imputed. Before 1990 data was suppressed to protect confidentiality.

Export the file data or boundaries: The data and the boundaries in this product can be exported into other systems like statistical (e.g. SAS, SPSS), database (e.g. Access, Oracle), spreadsheet (e.g. Excel, 1-2-3), or mapping (e.g. Arc View, MapInfo) packages. The files can be exported as .csv, .txt, .dbf, .mid and .mif, or .shp and shx files.