The purpose of this collaborative project is to extend the Batemen-Foust 1860 data set by collecting data for the same townships from the manuscripts of the 1880 Census of Population and Agriculture. These two data sets will then be linked across households between the two census dates to provide a large scale cross-section/time-series database on families, households, individuals, farms, and communities in the second half of the nineteenth century. The resulting composite database promises important new insights into the development of the American economy at a critical period in its history and offers long term research material for economic historians, demographers, rural sociologists and scholars from other disciplines. It is also of potential interest and relevance for contemporary research since the late nineteenth century witnessed the structural change of America from a rural, agricultural country to an urban-industrial one, a change analogous to the on-going shift from manufacturing to services.
