I understand that data at the level of minor civil division is not available in summary form for the 19th century. An earlier post to this forum suggested summarizing the microdata by minor division code to obtain the same result set. This approach seems to work for the 1880 census but I have been unable to use it for the 1850 census. The MCD code is not available in the 1850 microdata and I cannot identify any other field that could serve as a reasonable proxy, at least for New Hampshire, the subject of my study.
The summary data is available from census.gov but only in the form of scanned PDF images of the original 19th reports. I have tried OCR’ing these images but the combination of a 19th century typeface and poor print quality of the originals produced unusable results.
As I understand it, the microdata for 1850 were converted from transcriptions made by familysearch.org. Since their website permits searching by locality and the original documents clearly indicate the locality in the page heading, it seems incredible that this information was not included. Am I missing something obvious?