US Vital Statistics - Births (1931-1968)

The National Vital Statistics System of the National Center for Health Statistics collects vital statistics data for the U.S. Government which can be used by researchers and policymakers to monitor and improve the Nation's health.

An interactive index to the historical vital statistics tables of birth data published by the US government in annual volumes, and available from the (NBER) web site as page images. Birth data is Chapter 1 in each annual volume . The volumes are quite large, and downloading and printing an entire volume is likely to be burdensome for someone looking only for a single table. The burden is compounded if multiple years are required. Therefore each table from that chapter in each volume is available here as a separate Adobe Acrobat PDF (version 5 or later) file. We hope to extend this to other chapters in the volumes, and to digitize this data as funding becomes available. A few transcribed tables of births data are available from Karen Norberg. We also have post 1968 micro data available for download. Post 1968 published volumes are available from the NCHS and your local library.

To subset the list of tables presented in the index, just check the boxes for the tabulation variables of interest. Tabulations excluding the checked variables will disappear from the list. Don't be disappointed if your favorite tabulation is not always available!

Also of interest:

• Multi-year table of contents extracted from the published volumes 1931-1968.
• Complete volumes from which these tables are extracted.
• U.S. Vital Statistics System: Major Activities and Developments, 1950-95
• Micro Data

Address queries to data@nber.org.