Someone who collects census data by visiting individual homes. Please add anyone who worked for the U.S. Federal Census Bureau or equivalent in other countries.

A census is the procedure of systematically calculating, acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses include the census of agriculture, and other censuses such as the traditional culture, business, supplies, and traffic censuses. The United Nations defines the essential features of population and housing censuses as "individual enumeration, universality within a defined territory, simultaneity and defined periodicity", and recommends that population censuses be taken at least every ten years. United Nations recommendations also cover census topics to be collected, official definitions, classifications and other useful information to co-ordinate international practices.

Egypt

Censuses in Egypt first appeared in the late Middle Kingdom and developed in the New Kingdom Pharaoh Amasis, according to Herodotus, required every Egyptian to declare annually to the nomarch, "whence he gained his living". Under the Ptolemies and the Romans several censuses were conducted in Egypt by government officials

Ancient Greece

There are several accounts of ancient Greek city states carrying out censuses.

Israel

Censuses are mentioned in the Bible. God commands a per capita tax to be paid with the census for the upkeep of the Tabernacle. The Book of Numbers is named after the counting of the Israelite population according to the house of the Fathers after the exodus from Egypt. A second census was taken while the Israelites were camped in the plains of Moab.

King David performed a census that produced disastrous results. His son, King Solomon, had all of the foreigners in Israel counted.

When the Romans took over Judea in AD 6, the legate Publius Sulpicius Quirinius organised a census for tax purposes. The Gospel of Luke links the birth of Jesus either to this event, or to an otherwise unknown census conducted prior to Quirinius’ tenure.

China

One of the world's earliest preserved censuses was held in China in AD 2 during the Han Dynasty, and is still considered by scholars to be quite accurate. The population was registered as having 57,671,400 individuals in 12,366,470 households but on this occasion only taxable families had been taken into account - indicating the income and the number of soldiers who could be mobilized. Another census was held in AD 144.

India

The oldest recorded census in India is thought to have occurred around 330 BC during the reign of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya under the leadership of Kautilya or Chanakya and Ashoka.

Rome

The English term is taken directly from the Latin census, from censere ("to estimate"). The census played a crucial role in the administration of the Roman government, as it was used to determine the class a citizen belonged to for both military and tax purposes. Beginning in the middle republic, it was usually carried out every five years. It provided a register of citizens and their property from which their duties and privileges could be listed. It is said to have been instituted by the Roman king Servius Tullius in the 6th century BC, at which time the number of arms-bearing citizens was supposedly counted at around 80,000. The 6 AD "census of Quirinius" undertaken following the imposition of direct Roman rule in Judea was partially responsible for the development of the Zealot movement and several failed rebellions against Rome that ended in the Diaspora. The 15-year indiction cycle established by Diocletian in AD 297 was based on quindecennial censuses and formed the basis for dating in late antiquity and under the Byzantine Empire.

Medieval Europe

The Domesday Book was undertaken in AD 1086 by William I of England so that he could properly tax the land he had recently conquered. In 1183, a census was taken of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, to ascertain the number of men and amount of money that could possibly be raised against an invasion by Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria.

1328 : First national census of France (L'État des paroisses et des feux) mostly for fiscal purposes. It estimated the French population at 16 to 17 millions.

Inca Empire

In the 15th century, the Inca Empire had a unique way to record census information. The Incas did not have any written language but recorded information collected during censuses and other numeric information as well as non-numeric data on quipus, strings from llama or alpaca hair or cotton cords with numeric and other values encoded by knots in a base-10 positional system.

Spanish Empire

On May 25, 1577, King Philip II of Spain ordered by royal cédula the preparation of a general description of Spain's holdings in the Indies. Instructions and a questionnaire, issued in 1577 by the Office of the Cronista Mayor, were distributed to local officials in the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru to direct the gathering of information. The questionnaire, composed of fifty items, was designed to elicit basic information about the nature of the land and the life of its peoples. The replies, known as "relaciones geográficas", were written between 1579 and 1585 and were returned to the Cronista Mayor in Spain by the Council of the Indies.

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