Instructions for Using the Census Tree Data

1. Figure out which pair(s) of years you would like to link.

2. Go to our “Get the Data” page and click on the button corresponding to those years. This will take you to an OpenICPSR repository that hosts the data. You may need to log into ICPSR, or create an account.

3. Download the data from the repository, and unzip the file if necessary. If you have trouble unzipping, try using the software 7-Zip or the unarchiver.

4. You will also need to have the IPUMS versions of the relevant censuses. The public-use versions are available here, and information about accessing the restricted-use versions can be found here.

5. Use the histid variable from each census year to merge them both to the crosswalk. See our Read Me file for more information, including Stata code.

6. Be sure to properly cite any data used in your work, and then tell us about it!