I am writing to check whether you know (or ever have heard) about congressional districts/counties relationship files for the period 1953 – 2010.
In particular, I need to know to which congressional district each county belongs.
Those files are available at the Census website for 108-110th and 113th congresses. However, there were many changes due to gerrymandering, and so we cannot use those relationship files for all our period.
We wrote to the Census but they don’t have pre-2000 relationship files.
I am wondering whether you have heard if this data exists at all. If so, where can I find it?
Many thanks!
The best source for historical congressional districts and their relationship to counties is the US Congressional Districts Shapefiles project from UCLA. They maintain a set of shapefiles delineating all congressional districts back to 1789, and they have Excel spreadsheets with notes related to counties that were split by congressional districts. You can find these notes at the bottom of the website.
Thank you very much. This is extremely helpful. However, I don’t unfortunately have data on counties. Is there a similar dataset that enables me to link zipcodes and counties?