U.S. Census Schedules for Arkansas (Manuscript Census)

Also called

Manuscript Census

Location

Library Annex LISA 
see below for detailed location and call number information

Format

Microfilm

Items

Several hundred reels of film

Arrangement

Arranged by county and township within each census year.
A good guide to earlier county boundaries and names is Throndale's Map Guide to the Federal Census.
For Arkansas township names and boundaries, see Russell Baker's Arkansas township atlas: 1819-1930

Publication

U.S. National Archives

Content

The census schedules (sometimes called the "Manuscript Census" or the "Enumerated Census") are the handwritten ledgers of house-by-house information gathered by census takers.

Census schedules provide valuable information for the genealogist or local historian. Questions asked of each householder vary from census to census but usually include the names, ages, race, gender, and occupations of persons in the household (there are separate slave censuses for several years) as well as country of origin, and, in some years, religion affiliation, years of schooling / literacy, and land or property ownership.
Census schedules are usually not made available until 70 years after the census date to protect the privacy of respondents.

For more information about census schedules:

Population

Agriculture

Manufacturing

Mortality

Social Statistics

While online searching is now the easiest way to located specific names there are printed indexes to the population schedules.

For 1920 and 1930, the Libraries have a Soundex index to names located at Library Annex LISA Microfilm F 410 .I52 920a and F 410 .I52 1930a.

There are a number of specialized indexes for individual counties in Special Collection; these can be found by searching the Library Catalog under the subject [county name] ark--census, e.g., "Johnson County Ark --Census--1860."

Published census materials covering 1790-2010, which would usually provide county-level data for Arkansas, can be found in the GovRef Census collection on Level Four of Mullins Library as well as online through the Census Bureau website.