People’s History Lab: Research & Data

New research on historical populations often requires the digitization of individual-level records that originate from municipal, state and federal archives. Ongoing efforts to digitize records, and disseminate them, are a core feature of PHL’s mission. Similarly, efforts to connect academic researchers with newly available data from other research teams is also part of PHL’s mission. Please see below to learn more about PHL’s work in this area.

  • The Mothers' Pension Project, led by Anna Aizer, Sungwoo Cho, Shari Eli, Joseph Ferrie and Adriana Lleras-Muney,  is an effort to gather the individual records of the United States' first welfare recipients between 1911 and 1935. Mothers' Pensions (MP) were means-tested state-level aid programs which provided cash transfers to women with dependent children. The primary interest of the researchers associated with this project is to determine the long-run impact of these pensions on children's educational, earnings and health outcomes. However, since data collection has been conducted at the individual level and therefore traces the life events of MP recipients and their children, records may be of interest to archivists and genealogists. 

    To learn more, click here.

  • The Canadian Peoples (TCP) team has worked to digitize the complete-count Canadian Census spanning the years 1852 to 1921. Licenses to use the data for scholarly research will become available in 2024. To learn more about the teams work, click here.

  • More details coming soon!

  • More details coming soon