One of the lacunae in research on nineteenth-century American house
holds is the relative scarcity of systematic studies using individual-level census data
on rural populations. This essay uses individual-level data from the 1860 federal
manuscript census of Wood County, Ohio to provide base-line data for comparison
with similar studies by other scholars whose focus has been on regions other than
the rural Midwest. The questions that were asked and the methods and techniques
that were used to analyze the data in this essay were selected to increase
comparability with other work.
The variables analyzed are wealth, age, sex, ethnicity, structural type of
household, fertility, rural-urban residence, and the occupation of married
household heads. The findings are, for the most part, supportive of other research
on the same subjects.
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