Comments on The Genealogue: Census Name Number Nonsense

Randy: Ah, but the original press release said "mo...

2006-06-27T03:11:00.000-04:00

Randy: Ah, but the original press release said "more than five billion searchable names." Methinks the reporter who regurgitated this release mistook the total number of names in all of Ancestry's databases for the number of names in their U.S. Census collection.

Andy: Nice catch! I've switched the link to a version of the story written by someone who can subtract.

"... our population isn't supposed to reach 300 mi...

2006-06-27T03:02:00.000-04:00

"... our population isn't supposed to reach 300 million until this fall."

Chris, careful on the article you linked to here. They think that 2006 - 1967 = 29 (instead of 39) :)

Chris,I'll bet it was 5 billion pieces of informat...

2006-06-27T01:28:00.000-04:00

Chris,

I'll bet it was 5 billion pieces of information - surname, given name, gender, race, age, birthplace, parent's birthplace, immigration data, languages, occupation, etc. If they indexed all of that, then that comes out to something like 1.2 billion pieces for a population of 100 million.

Between 1850 and 1880, they collected only half of that for a smaller population, and between 1790 and 1840 it was even less. So 5 billion as a total number of bits of info is certainly possible.

Randy

Or maybe they ran out of census pages and started ...

2006-06-26T22:39:00.000-04:00

Or maybe they ran out of census pages and started indexing their own indexes.

They were probably fudging the truth by counting u...

2006-06-26T21:42:00.000-04:00

They were probably fudging the truth by counting up every first, middle and last name in the census, and counting the enumerator on every page as well.