Authors: Zachary Flynn, Britton Davis, Josh Nicholls, Bryson Mumford
Mentors: Joseph Price
Insitution: Brigham Young University
The United States has massive amounts of public data and land ownership stretching back to the early homesteading period of the American West. This data has been of limited use for economic research because it only includes the name of the ownership, thus making it impossible to study racial and gender differences in land on ownership. We develop an innovative method for linking individual land records to US census records. Our key innovation is that we start by linking individuals with unique names that we can make from land record to census record based on name and town. We then use the geo-coordinates in the land records and the proximity of households on the census sheets to link other individuals that have more common names. This two-step process allows us to link 36% of a sample of people in the land records in Colorado to a census record between 1880 and 1940. This new linked data will be a valuable resource for individuals doing research on the development of the American economy, and also people doing genealogical research.