This article describes the linkage methods that will be used in the Decennial Census Digitization and Linkage project (DCDL), which is completing the final four decades of a longitudinal census infrastructure covering the past 170 years of United States history.

This paper describes the technological advances in data capture that have enabled this centuries-long longitudinal data infrastructure to flourish while still leaving a sizeable “missing link” from 1950 to 1990.

In this paper, we document the 1990 Census Name Recovery Pilot (NRP) project, which was used to identify the most accurate and cost-effective means to recover respondent names, focusing on the example of the 1990 census.

This paper describes the DCDL, which is an initiative to produce linked restricted microdata files from the decennial censuses of 1960 through 1990.

Members of the DCDL team describe different components of the project.

Linking data sheds light on where and why people move, and generational changes in social class and family structure.