Mortality in the United States, 1850-1880: New Evidence from Complete-Count Mortality Censuses Linked to Complete-Count Ipums Datasets

J. David Hacker, University of Minnesota
Susan Leonard, University of Michigan

We link new complete-count microdata of the 1850-1880 mortality censuses to complete-count 1850-1880 IPUMS datasets to examine correlates of mortality in the nineteenth-century United States. We discuss challenges to linking the mortality and population censuses, particularly the challenges of linking the 1850 and 1860 censuses, which did not include family numbers on the mortality schedules. We examine causes of death recorded in the mortality censuses and estimate under-counts by age, sex and race. We focus our paper on an analysis of the impact of wealth, residence location and other covariates of mortality in 1870, which includes real and personal estate wealth on the population censuses and family numbers on the population and mortality censuses, facilitating the linking process. In contrast to prior studies, we employ area fixed effects models, which allow us to control for unobserved heterogeneity at the county level.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 203. Linking 19th Century Census Records