If I wanted to determine the location, i.e. their addresses, of stevedores or dock workers in Portland Maine by street address across census’ in the 19th century would it be possible to do that?
Please note that IPUMS strictly prohibits using the data for genealogical purposes. For genealogical research, you will need to request data through an organization such as Ancestry.
Accessing the residential addresses of persons in the full count decennial census microdata on IPUMS USA requires applying for a restricted use data license through an educational or research institution such as a university. Using just the publicly available data, you can obtain the census enumeration district (ENUMDIST) for persons in census samples from 1880-1940. You will then need to find a resource that provides the boundaries for enumeration districts: the National Archives and stevemorse.org are good places to start. No geographic identifiers below the city level are available prior to 1880 in the public data. You may also find it helpful to know that we provide the latitude and longitude coordinates (YGPS and XGPS) of the addresses of persons residing in one of the 39 cities (Portland is not included) mapped by the Urban Transition Historical GIS Project for the 1880 census. Once you’ve added the geography variable that works best, you can add occupation (OCC) to your customized data extract. Our FAQ page and short video tutorials can help familiarize you with IPUMS data and our extract system.