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MCDSTR
Minor Civil Division, alphabetic string
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Description

MCDSTR provides the original alphabetic string for minor civil division. Minor civil divisions are the principal independent political divisions 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.

A separate variable, MCD, assigns numeric codes to minor civil divisions. MCD relies on a historically modified version of the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) naming scheme.

MCDSTR generally must be used in combination with one of the state variables (STATEICP or STATEFIP) and the COUNTYICP variable.

For the 1940 1% sample, STDMCD also contains string entries for minor civil division. For most users, STDMCD is likely to be more useful than MCDSTR because the strings have been cleaned and standardized for consistency.