1980 Tract Level Population Data

NHGIS
1

I have downloaded the table NT1A from the 1980 STF1. In this table it should be reported the population of every single 1980 census tract (and consequently of every county) in the US.

However, the total number of counties in the file is 1812 instead of more than 3000.

So for example Bibb county of Alabama (FIPS 01007) is not recorded in the dataset but is recorded to exist in these files from the Census Bureau (County Intercensal Tables 1980-1990). And, additionally the once I summed across the variable pop80 across every census tracts I obtained a total of 196 million when the world bank reports a total population of 226 million.

How should I proceed?

2

In 1980, the US Census Bureau only created census tracts for counties that are within Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs, what are today called Core-based Statistical Areas). Thus, tracts do not exhaustively cover the entire United States in that decade.

The 1990 Census of Population was the first census for which we have census tracts for every county in the United States and Puerto Rico.

If you need sub-county geographies that exhaustively subdivide the entire country, you will need to use “County Subdivisions”.