American Colonial Wealth Estimates, 1774 (ICPSR 7329)
Principal Investigator(s): Jones, Alice Hanson, Washington University. Department of Economics
Summary:
This study was the outcome of an extensive research project that cataloged and analyzed the various types of wealth that existed in the American colonies in 1774, just before the Revolution. Data about 919 decedents having resided in 21 colonial counties in both rural and urban settings were collected from county probate records in the New England colonies, the Middle Colonies, New York, and the South. WEALTH OF A NATION TO BE: THE AMERICAN COLONIES ON THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION (see Related Literature associated with this study) discusses the entire project, providing tables, graphs, summaries, and conclusions. AMERICAN COLONIAL WEALTH, DOCUMENTS AND METHODS includes some documentation for the codes used as well as the verbatim listings of the probate files of the 919 persons studied.
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Dataset(s)
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Study Description
Citation
Jones, Alice Hanson. American Colonial Wealth Estimates, 1774. ICPSR07329-v2. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2012-09-11. doi:10.3886/ICPSR07329.v2
Persistent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07329.v2
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Scope of Study
Subject Terms: agricultural productivity, American Colonies, eighteenth century, historical periods, land ownership, personal wealth, wills
Smallest Geographic Unit: county
Geographic Coverage: United States
Time Period:
- 1774
Date of Collection:
- 1968
Unit of Observation: probate inventories
Universe: Probate inventories issued in 1774 for decedents from the American colonies.
Data Types: administrative records data
Methodology
Sample: The sample design aimed to ensure representativeness. Contiguous counties were grouped into units of approximately 20,000 wealthholders, out of which a representative county was drawn based on the number of wealthholders in each county. The cases in the sample were then weighted, first to reflect the age distribution of the total population, and then to take into account those individuals who did not have their estates probated.
Weight: For a description of the weights and their intended usage, please see Jones, Alice Hanson. American Colonial Wealth: Documents And Methods. New York: Arno Press, 1977, Section VI: Weighting Procedures.
Data Source:
county probate records
Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
- Created variable labels and/or value labels.
- Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
Version(s)
Original ICPSR Release: 1984-05-11
Version History:
- 2012-09-11 SAS, SPSS, and Stata setups, as well as SPSS and Stata system files, and SAS transport (CPORT) files have been added to this collection. The data for Dataset 8 (Wealth Summary for Middle Colonies: Middle Colonies) have been converted from ASCII card-image format to ASCII column-delimited format. The data for Dataset 4 have been cleaned up by removing non-ASCII characters. The codebook has been updated.
- 2006-01-18 File CB7329.ALL.PDF was removed from any previous datasets and flagged as a study-level file, so that it will accompany all downloads.
- 2002-01-14 A blank line was deleted at the end of Part 24.
Related Publications
- List all ~65 citations associated with this study
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