But I recommend answering, because every response is one more body that gets counted when they figure out how much representation a state gets in Congress. Which is hellaciously important, in a representative democratic republic.

A little secret: at the end of the day, all the Census Bureau wants to know is how many people were living in a given household as of April 15th of that particular year. If you really, really don't want to answer the census questions, nobody's going to drag you off to jail if you don't. Seriously.

@Myana Yes! And apparently my ancestors did!

The census is mandated by US law, in fact it's in Article 1 of the US Constitution, so we *have to* do it. And the questions are chosen by Congress. So if you get a form that seems really long & invasive, take it up with your representatives, the Census didn't do it.

A lot of people seemed to think the census was this arbitrary thing, a department completely separate from all the others, & the census was designed to 'spy on' US citizens.

Actually, the Census Bureau is part of the US Dept. of Commerce, it's done to allocate how many seats a state gets in the US House of Representatives, & no, it isn't to spy on anyone.

I worked for the 2000 US Census & learned that, among other things, most people in the US have zero idea why the census is done or how it works, or why the forms ask the questions they ask, or who's responsible for making the forms.

I have a page open from the 1930 US census. It asks some stuff we're used to answering: name, age, occupation, things like that. Other questions are outdated now: does the household have a radio? Can they read? Did they go to school?

I'm going through more family history & digging up census records. It's fascinating to see how the questions asked in each census changed over the decades.

We were lucky enough to be able to visit several times, the first time I was about 14 or so. Maui was our favorite island - Maui nō ka ‘oi. On one trip we visited Lahaina. The banyan tree was amazing.

I'm so sorry, Maui.

My folks lived in Hawaii many, many years ago. Dad had been drafted & was set to go to Vietnam. He was in Hawaii for jungle training & ended up getting a medical reassignment to a desk job at Pearl Harbor. He & my mom lived there in the very earliest years of their marriage & loved the islands so much.

There probably isn't anything I could say that hasn't already been said. I'm so sorry, Maui. 💔

Shit. I'm only now just reading about the Maui fires. Jesus.

"I'm madder than a goat on fire!" -my nephew, when he was about 6

@corlin Sweet!

BFA in Visual Communications here. Covered a bit of everything, ended up a graphic designer for about 10 years before burning out. Couldn't really focus on 1 thing bc I loved the technical processes for *everything*.

@corlin Where'd you get your expertise on this?

@corlin 👍👍👍👍👍

@corlin One advantage I do have is that I know almost all of the people in the photos (even some of the really old ones), and I know what kinds of cameras & film we used over time in our family. Like my mom had a Kodak Brownie in the 1950s, & dad got a Pentax SLR in the 1970s. I know what kind of film at least some folks used & when.

@corlin It's a minor archaeological project, as much as a genealogical one!

@Hisabah Yeah I'm very disappointed. I wish they'd given me the negatives but they were dead set on destroying them as useless. Philistines, I tellya.

@corlin @corlin I wondered if it had something to do with development processes of the times. Good call re: sorting by year - best I can probably do is by decade, as the majority of the images aren't marked with the date. I'm going by clues a lot of the time: age of people in the image, paper texture, size of the print, etc...