Mapping American Religious Ecologies: The 1926 U.S. Census of Religious Bodies

FAIN: PW-290435-23

George Mason University (Fairfax, VA 22030-4444)
Lincoln A. Mullen (Project Director: July 2022 to present)
John G. Turner (Co Project Director: February 2023 to present)

The digitization of approximately 130,000 schedules from the 1926 U.S. Census of Religious Bodies, association of the records with spatial data, and transcription of the data for a subset of congregations.

This project will transform the 1926 U.S. Census of Religious Bodies, which has individual schedules for 232,154 congregations, into a spatial dataset. That collection is the only federal census of religious groups with extant schedules, but it is unusable by researchers because it is not digitized, searchable, or transcribed. With previous NEH support, we have begun digitization of this collection; further support will enable us to complete the digitization of the census. We will digitize the schedules, make those records freely searchable and browsable online, transcribe a representative selection and open the remainder to crowdsourcing, and create maps and visualizations that contextualize the records. The result will be the single most detailed and comprehensive spatial dataset for American religion, usable by scholars in history and religious studies, by local historians, and by the public.