It is important for researchers to note that Mayor Grant’s outgoing correspondence in this matter will be found in the “letterpress” volumes. Maintained as a separate series, outgoing correspondence from mayoral offices during the latter part of the nineteenth century is in the form of carbon copies on thin onion-skin paper bound into volumes. There are approximately 160 volumes in the series; each volume is generally indexed by the name of the correspondent, or subject. Collection Guides provides further information and an inventory of the series.
The whereabouts of Mayor Grant’s “police” census within New York City government offices after 1890 is not known. Likewise, there is no documentation of when the Municipal Archives received the census volumes, but it has been part of the collection since at least the early 1970s. There is also no information about the 113 missing volumes.
The fate of the federal 1890 census is known, however. In 1921, a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C. damaged hundreds of thousands of pages. Although the charred pages were salvaged, in December 1932, the Chief Clerk of the Bureau of the Census submitted a record disposal application to the Librarian of Congress that included what remained of the 1890 census record. On February 21, 1933, Congress authorized destruction. [1]
