With Leah Boustan, now of Princeton University, Abramitzky is helping to change the way we look at American immigrants during a 14-year effort to follow Americans across generations by linking together their records in one of humanity’s greatest data troves: old decennial census files.
Seventy-two years after each census, the government releases every sheet of data collected by enumerators in a single, magnificent data dump. But for decades, that was more or less the end of it. Piles of magnificent data dumps sat slowly decaying in government warehouses and data centers.
It took pioneering researchers such as Northwestern University’s Joseph Ferrie years of tedious searching to link even a couple thousand people across multiple censuses in the 678 million records now available.
Within a few years of that phone call, the high data priesthood at IPUMS at the University of Minnesota would make much of that historical census data freely available to scholars online. Today, hundreds of millions of records at IPUMS can be credited to genealogy sources such as Ancestry — a for-profit Utah organization that was purchased in 2020 for $4.7 billion by private-equity behemoth Blackstone — and FamilySearch, a nonprofit subsidiary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that relies heavily on volunteer efforts to decipher old records.
Ancestry alone has more than 30 billion records in its database, including contributions from its almost 3.8 million subscribers. Using the genealogy data, the economists could soon follow generations of immigrants from the Ellis Island era as they assimilated (or didn’t) and prospered (or didn’t).
“Our work would not be possible if not for the volunteers that digitized this data,” Abramitzky said.