Link rates for daughters - a comparison

Recently, we've been working on our annual report. As part of that, we report on the link rates, that is, how successful we are at finding people in the census. For the most part, our link rates are pretty consistent from year to year. There is one group of children, for whom our link rates have increased a lot from 2015 to 2016. This group consists of the daughters that are found in the pension but whose married names are not listed.

The following tables for both Project 1 and Project 2 show what percent of the daughters without married names in the pensions that we were able to link to census or death records during both 2015 and 2016.

Project 1

	1870	1880	1900	1910	1920	1930	1940	Death
2015	91.9	90.8	79.4	71.8	67.6	64.5	56.3	69
2016	90.7	93.7	84.7	77.2	73.7	70.7	62.5	75.6

Project 2

	1870	1880	1900	1910	1920	1930	1940	Death
2015	72.4	87.5	61.4	41.4	26.4	18.7	13.5	26.8
2016	79.6	92.7	70.3	49.5	35.5	28.0	20.1	36.0

For Project 1, our link rates increased by an average of 4.7 percentage points from 2015 to 2016. For Project 2, or link rates increased by an average of 7.9 percentage points from 2015 to 2016.

We attribute this increase not only to the greater availability of marriage records online, but specifically to the fact that all of you are going to Familysearch.org and searching for those marriage records. It is well worth the effort to find those marriage records.

The take away here is, don't forget to use Family Search.

More link rates - All daughters

We know that locating daughters in the census can be difficult. As the following table shows, we do a pretty good job.

	1900		1910		1920		1930		1940		Ever Linked		Death
# Searched Project 1-White non-POW	5,103		4,937		4,747		4,443		3,937		5,606		5,606
	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%
All Daughters	4,158	81.5	3,728	75.5	3,407	71.8	3,049	68.6	2,359	59.9	5,598	99.8	4,017	71.7
Outside Veteran's Household	2,143	42.0	2,972	60.2	3,134	66.0	2,991	67.3	2,355	59.8	4,178	74.5	na	na
# Searched Project 2 - USCT	856		851		827		797		775		940		939*
	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%
All Daughters	497	58.1	344	40.4	249	30.1	172	21.6	121	15.6	937	99.7	261	27.8
Outside Veteran's Household	155	18.1	229	26.9	218	26.4	167	21.0	121	15.6	416	44.3	na	na
# Searched POW	3,661		3,546		3,396		3,182		2,863		4,100		4,100
	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%
All Daughters	2,903	79.3	2,541	71.7	2,300	67.7	2,008	63.1	1,549	54.1	3,881	94.7	2,749	67.0
Outside Veteran's Household	1,347	36.8	1,945	54.9	2,117	62.3	1,981	62.3	1,547	54.0	2,758	67.3	na	na
# Searched Andersonville Siblings	267		257		243		227		204		282		282
	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%	# found	%
All Daughters	205	76.8	173	67.3	159	65.4	137	60.4	104	51.0	282	100.0	171	60.6
Outside Veteran's Household	128	47.9	141	54.9	146	60.1	136	59.9	104	51.0	203	72.0	na	na

*Some death information was not searched as the child lived outside the US at time of death.