Actually, the correct spelling is cenSus. If you would take the time to look at the original census forms, they always had names, addresses, and ages, from the start. Of course they did not have mail addresses in the early days, but they had tract and parcel and other data so you can, by comparing land records with the census records, fairly accurately see where people lived. Also, the early questions asked about literacy and they had race, too except it was color, and if persons were slaves or freemen.(posted 9621 days ago)In searching for heirs to a piece of land, the old census records were invaluable to me. I have found a university library where all the available ones (some got burnt during the Civil War) are on microfilm and with their aid (and a lot of squinting) I was able, because of the race and age and name information, to track families and their descendants and, from their locations in the different jurisdictions, to go to the circuit courts in the areas and find their marriage records (showing parents names) and find wills or partition suits (not so hard when a person has disappeared from one census to the next, you can assume he/shie might be dead, so you only have to look through ten years of records. If the library has also newspapers on microfilm, you can even find the obituary and there you will find not only the date of death but also corroborating data such as name of wife which hopefully matches name on corresponding census record.
Also, now the social security death records are available on disk, and you can search them and match them (the old ones of course) with the census records. These public records are invaluable for all sorts of research besides genealogical research.
Citizens of this country who are here legally know that they need to stand up and be counted. Illegal aliens, I suppose, would not wish to do so, or persons who had something to hide.
Some of the Census questions are strange, I agree, no doubt about it. How many bathrooms? But then, some folks do not have indoor bathrooms. If you are not paranoid and looking for evil intent, perhaps you could assume the intent is good? In some areas, plans are being made to convert to indoor bathrooms, or to replace roof water collection into cisterns with "city" water.
Beyond this, if a person has questions about the census, why not ask a person in authority who has accurate knowledge as to the reasoning behind the census, rather than just attacking it with hostility and suspicion? Why not look back at the old or original census records to see what questions were asked in the prior surveys of the American populace? Personally, I believe the framers of the latest census questions should have left the ability to read and educational questions in. Many of the persons in our prison populace do not have the ability to read. I should think this would be a key question in the present-day census, just as it was in the original ones.