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MCD
Minor Civil Division code
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Description

MCD provides the codes for minor civil divisions. The coding scheme generally follows a historically modified version of the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). Minor civil divisions are the principal independent political division at the sub-county level. Historically, the most common example of a minor civil division is the township, but they have a variety of state-specific descriptive terms, including town, precinct, beat, and district.

Coding of MCD was based on a listing of codes used for the 1990 U.S. census. Many minor civil divisions that we encounter in the historical census data no longer exist because of political and administrative reorganization at the sub-county level. In these cases we assigned non-standard FIPS codes consistent with the present-day FIPS coding format.

Many MCD boundaries and some MCD names changed over time. The IPUMS does not impose a uniform MCD boundary system on the data, so a particular MCD listed for a given year in the IPUMS should be assumed to have the boundaries that it had in that year.

Note that MCD is state and county dependent. The codes must be read in combination with one of the state variables (STATEICP or STATEFIP) and the COUNTYICP variable.