September 5, 2003

Charles Louis Kincannon
Director
U.S. Census Bureau
4700 Silver Hill Road
Washington DC 20233-0001

Dear Mr. Kincannon,

I have been researching my family history and am writing to call your attention to a problem employee. The employee in question is one of your census takers, a Mr. William H. Morgan. Although Mr. Morgan may have been involved in collecting census data in other places and times, it is his shoddy work on the 1870 census for Clay County, Illinois that is causing me so much grief. Mr. Morgan’s handwriting is simply illegible. I am not able to read the majority of the names he has listed.

I have seen other examples of this sort of sloppy handwriting from other census takers in the nineteenth century (although those census lists did not contain information I needed and I did not bother to take note of those census takers’ names), and I am quite abhorred at the quality of your census information overall. Do you have no screening process? Will you hire anyone, regardless of the chicken-scratch nature of their penmanship? I sincerely hope that this is not the case.

In the future, I hope to see your bureau’s information presented in a clear and legible manner. As for Mr. Morgan, I hope that he will not be permitted to participate in any more of your censuses.

Thank you,

Sarah Pancake