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NHGIS offers historical and contemporary census summary and GIS data for free
Summary
Jonathan Schroeder of IPUMS highlighted NHGIS as a free resource (NIH/NSF‑funded) providing census summary tables and nationwide boundary files back to 1790, plus specialized environmental and watershed products and a web data‑finder with a data cart workflow.
Jonathan Schroeder of the IPUMS Center for Data Integration at the University of Minnesota gave a demo of NHGIS and said users can access summary tables and GIS boundary files spanning U.S. censuses back to 1790. He emphasized that NHGIS provides nationwide extents down to block groups and blocks for recent decades and that the site’s data finder lets researchers build a data cart and submit extract requests for zipped downloads.
Schroeder said the project is grant‑supported and free to users, adding that account terms ask researchers to cite NHGIS and not redistribute whole files to protect the project’s funding model. "We have summary data going all the way back to 1790," Schroeder said, and he pointed participants to ipums.org for the grid of IPUMS sites. He also called attention to specialized NHGIS products—land‑cover summaries, watershed population tables, and new tract and block‑level historical boundary files—that are published on separate pages from the main data finder.
