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Description

ANCESTR1 provides the respondent's self-reported ancestry or ethnic origin. In all years except 1990 and 2000, respondents could give as many ancestries as they saw fit. ANCESTR1 records the first response, while ANCESTR2 records the second response, if one exists. Additional responses were ignored, with the exception of 17 "three-origin" combination codes retained in the 1980 samples; these are described in section A of the comparability discussion below. Some compound responses such as "Pennsylvania Dutch" or "French Canadian" were treated as a single response. Respondents could give virtually any response, though they were instructed not to give a religion (the census is not allowed to collect information on religion). A few responses were not categorized in the samples and were instead coded "Uncodable," "Deferred Cases," or "Other." These uncategorized responses were usually religions.

If a respondent listed both a broad category and a subset of that category, such as "German-Bavarian," the Census Bureau used only the subset and ignored the broad category.

The IPUMS generally follows the Census Bureau's practice of coding responses alphabetically within geographic regions. Note that some responses, especially within the NORTH AMERICAN (NON-HISPANIC) geographic region, denote people such as "African-American," "French-Canadian," or "American" whose responses indicate origins outside of the geographical region within which coding schemes have placed them. Some similar responses might therefore appear in separate places.

User Caution: The labels associated with each IPUMS ancestry value do not contain all of the possible responses included within each ancestry code. To ensure that they use all codes that are necessary to their research, users are advised to examine the codes and frequencies table and the detailed components of the ancestry values (see Supplemental Code Information below).