The Unincorporated Hamlet: An Analysis of Data Sources.

The few studies of American hamlets now in existence have been primarily concerned with the survival of these tiny agglomerations-have good roads and automobiles caused them to be superfluous? In all of these studies Dun and Bradstreet's reference books of commercial ratings have been the principal data source. In some, Rand McNally's and Cram's atlases provided supplementary data. For 12 counties in southwestern Wisconsin, where I am making a field study of hamlets, counts of these settlements were made from the three sources noted above for 13 irregularly spaced years beginning in 1882 and terminating in 1940. The discrepancies between the three sources is striking. Recent counts by these same sources were compared with data collected in the field during the spring of 1940. The results are such as to raise serious doubts whether the published sources are sufficiently reliable in their hamlet counts to permit the data to be used in decade to decade comparisons of hamlet numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]