David W. Morgan wrote:
/state/county/census/fedcens/1850/ ???
Probably, yes.
So we would have directories like:
/state/county/census/1850
/state/county/census/1880
/state/county/census/fedcens/1850/
/state/county/census/fedcens/1880/
To bring some of you up-to-date... when we started the census project to
get complete census transcriptions in the Archives.. a question was
raised... "do we replace existing census files with the new complete,
standardized ones?" After discussion.. we decided to not delete anything
that was submitted. Some submitters went to a lot of trouble to
transcribe a census producing only abstracted information.. enough to
help other researchers. So, we decided not to replace any files, but to
store them all. Some submitters added marriage info for example, and
that data would be lost if we only kept the standardized/complete census
project file.
The standardized/complete transcription is needed for a search engine
that would search the databases created with the census project software
(CTA and CART). If someone wanted to search for all Williams that were
blacksmiths in 1850 for instance... a database would make that possible,
while a text file, or multiple text files, would be more complicated to
search.
One of the advantages of this.. would be that same researcher could
search for all Williams that were blacksmiths in 1860, and discover the
migration of their ancestor. This is just an example.
So.. to make a long story short... it makes a cleaner directory if the
standardized census transcriptions can be identified easily, and the
links to them would not have to be changed.
Linda