For a portrait of your city, consult the Census Bureau Web site for demographic information. The story will be used as the lead article in a special edition honoring the anniversary of your city's founding. First, look at this demonstration by Jeff South about how to access demographic material from the Census Bureau.

     Using the URL-finding strategy we used in Chapter 1, we go to: http://www.census.gov

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The bureau collects reams of data about communities. The "mother lode" comes from the census taken every 10 years. Since December 2000, the bureau has been releasing increasingly more detailed numbers from the 2000 census. Besides the decennial headcounts, the bureau does surveys, estimates and studies every year on subjects ranging from population and business activity to agricultural output and tax collections.

     You can look up data from the 1990 and 2000 census by using the Census Bureau's online tool, called American FactFinder. Let's start by getting the 2000 census numbers for Charlottesville, Virginia— a large college town and home of the University of Virginia. Click on the American FactFinder link, then set it to find data for Charlottesville.

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American FactFinder responds by displaying a table of population and housing data from the 2000 census. It shows Charlottesville's population—broken down by sex, age and race—and the number of owner-occupied and renter-occupied housing units.

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To find comparable data from the 1990 census, you can click on the link to "Related Items" or return to the previous Web page. In the box next to "Show me," specify a table of 1990 data:

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     That search will yield the following data. Unlike the 2000 table, this one doesn't include percentages. (The Census Bureau is still fixing bugs in American FactFinder.) So to make comparisons with the most recent census, you should put the 1990 data into a spreadsheet and calculate the percentage of the population that was male, female; black, white, etc.

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     To put census numbers in perspective, you also should get the corresponding figures for your metropolitan area, your state and the nation as a whole—all available from the Census Bureau's Web site.

     You may want to flesh out your profile with additional data from the bureau. From the agency's home page, click on the links to income or poverty, or to the economic census (business statistics collected every five years).

     You also can drill down to historical census data. The bureau has put online, for example, population numbers for localities back to 1900:

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     Thus, we can see that Charlottesville's population has grown from 6,449 in 1900 to 45,049 in 2000.