This is the order you should input the household in every census decade:
- The target person that you are searching for (that is the soldier, his child, or his spouse that he had children with)
- The head of household
- All the remaining people in the order in which they appear (just go from the top of the list to the bottom)
I've come across some households in which the our target person and his family were boarders in someone else's house. The inputter entered the target person and all his family, then input the head of household and the remaining household members. This is incorrect.
It is very important that we input all households the same way and in the same order.
Honestly, this is the first I have heard of this "rule". Yes, it usually makes sense to input the soldier, then the head of household and down the list, but it equally makes sense to input the soldier and his family, then proceed to the rest of them. I know I have done this on occasion. I don't know where it makes a difference, the order we input them, but from the point of view of the inputter, it doesn't. Because it bothered me that I have no recollection of this rule, I went back and looked at our training manual; if it is in there, I couldn't find it.
ReplyDeleteWe want everyone to do it this way, because we need to be consistent for the data users. If they want to reconstruct the manuscript household order, they can, because we always input the household in the same way. We do it for the user not the inputter.
DeleteOk, so I did finally find it in the manual. There is one sentence that refers to Household Member Number
ReplyDelete