Data: Data Options

NAPP Data Extraction System

The current release of the NAPP database is preliminary. It consists of 4 complete-count censuses from Canada (1881), Great Britain (1881), Norway (1900), and the United States (1880), and contains the records of 17 million households and 83 million individuals. We invite researchers to use the data for scholarly and educational purposes, but to do so they must apply for access.

  • Online registration -- If you are not yet registered, you can register online to use the data.
    Note: The NAPP data is only available for academic or policy research, under the terms of our agreement with the creators of the original transcription of the censuses. You will need to provide a 25-50 word description of your research project, along with basic information on your disciplinary and institutional affiliations. Registration is normally completed within 2 business days.
  • Registered Users -- users who have already registered can log on to create extracts from the NAPP database using the NAPP data extraction system.
  • Guests can log on to the NAPP data extraction system using the username "guest", and the password "guest." Be aware that no extract will be created.

Use our online data analysis system

  • Don't have a statistics package? Just looking for a quick statistic? Make tables and more with this easy-to-use online data analysis system.

Download data

Note: Users have reported problems with using Internet Explorer to download extracted files. IE tries to extract the files, and assigns the downloaded file a ".tgz" extension. Some compression programs will not uncompress this file, as the extension does not match the actual file type. We recommend that you download data with a Mozilla based browser, such as Firefox. No problems have been reported with the Macintosh Safari browser.

  • Download extracts that you have created using the NAPP data extraction system.
  • Download U.S. 1880 text files -- For users interested in the original machine-readable transcriptions of the U.S. 1880 census, these are available as tab-delimited ASCII files for each county. Separate registration is required to access this data. It will be of limited interest to most researchers, as the data consists of text strings, rather than numerically coded responses. Links between the coded version of the data available in the extract system, and the text files can be made with the variable RECIDUS, common to both files.