FORDYCE — When a newspaper article reported that, according to the 2010 Census, Dallas County was one of five in Arkansas that had not a single centenarian, it irked Norma Jaynes on behalf of her friend, Frances Meador, who is 101 1/2 years old.
“Well, I couldn’t understand ... why they’d left her off, because I’d known her all my life,” said Jaynes, 80. “There may be others.”
There certainly are many others - thousands of people like Frances Meador nationwide - who are missed by the census every 10 years.
The missing don’t usually stand out to local residents, particularly enough to warrant a call to the newspaper. Most people wouldn’t know if one or two 35-year olds were missing from the counts, even in Dallas Coun-ty, population 8,116. (By the way, according to the census, there are 85 people that age in the county.)
But a missing centenarian is another matter, and being missed was a sort of affront to Meador’s longevity.
If you make it to 100, shouldn’t you at least show up in one of the most exhaustive, thorough and expensive resident counts in history?
The answer is complicated.
Finding Meador isn’t hard. Her home, a 1950s-era Sam Clippard design, can be seen easily from Barner Street, a worn blacktop off Arkansas 8.
The house sits just outside of Fordyce, the county seat, on 40 acres. Seven generations of Dallas County leaders - county judges, businessmen and other prominent citizens - all have some family tie to the woman who lives there.
Her son, Joe Bill Meador, and his wife, Sandy, also live on the family estate.
None of them ever received a census form, even after Joe Bill, a former county judge, says he chased down a census worker in his car and asked to be counted.
“They never came and took our information,” he said.
“We got something in the mail. You didn’t get anything in the mail?” asked Betsy Meador, wife of Joe Bill’s brother and current Quorum Court member John Benton Meador.
“No, that’s why I ran down the census worker that was driving down the end of this street,” Joe Bill said.
The census taker’s oversight is unfortunate and rare, census officials say, but it happens.
Yes, Meador is a community luminary, hardly someone to miss, particularly when playing the piano. But prestige and local celebrity have nothing to do with the census.
At its most basic level, the census is the egalitarian antithesis of social status. Everyone counts as just one added to their neighbor’s one and so on. When those numbers are added up and grouped into blocks, tracts, places and counties, they show a portrait of the nation, the Census Bureau is fond of saying.
So when there’s a piece missing in the picture - in this case, a count of zero centenarians in Dallas County- should that goose egg raise some numerical alarm?
The answer is no, according to calculations by Giovanni Petris, an associate professor in the department of mathematical sciences at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
The statistician found that, according to state figures, there’s about a 20 percent likelihood that a population the size of Dallas County’s wouldn’t have someone 100 years or older.
“In order for a count of zero [for centenarians] to be significant, the county population should be at least15,060,” Petris wrote in an email.
So in essence, it makes sense for small places to be missing some types of people.
In fact, when only one or two are present, the census hides them - intentionally.
Meador is sure she didn’t get a form. But even if she had filled one out, census officials say, she wouldn’t have shown up as a 100-year-old in her county, for the very reason her friends and family wanted her counted.
She’s too rare.
Meador would have been one of the “ones and twos” in a geographic area intentionally “swapped out” to keep their identity hidden, as required by federal law, said census bureau statistician Laura Zayatz.
“If a county just has one person [of a particular age group] in it, they’re going to be swapped. I mean, what else are we going to do? They would be identified completely,” said Zayatz, the chair of the Census Bureau’s disclosure review board.
Sections of U.S. Code Title 13 prohibit bureau officials, under penalty of fines and up to five years in prison, from publishing information that can be used to identify any particular “establishment or individual” until 72 years after the census. That’s 2082 for the latest one.
Zayatz said the bureau goes through all the census numbers before their public release looking for “outliers,” such as the very elderly or “someone who is of a given race in an area where everybody else is of another race.”
Those outliers are then swapped, a process by which they are stripped of almost all of their demographic identity including age, race and sex, and that information is then recorded in another similar geography, most commonly nearby.
The only remaining information left in the place where they live is the total amount of people in their household and whether the person is under or over 18, a number necessary for reapportionment purposes.
The bureau tries to swap at the smallest geographic area possible, such as the block or tract level. But that’s not always the case.
Meador would likely be one of the rarest ones that would be moved out of their county, Zayatz said.
Publishing false information may seem counter to the census’ goal of getting an accurate count, but D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer for the Pew Research Center who specializes in demographics, said the “blurred” data is necessary.
“Imagine yourself as a 110-year-old, and you’re worried about being tracked down by marketers or stalked, you don’t want anyone to be able to find out where you live,” she said.
While the outliers in the census numbers make for interesting stories, Cohn said, “making sure that a 100-year old person is recorded on the block in which she lives isn’t really part of the general uses of the census.”
Still, having an official census, and later a newspaper story, say you don’t exist is a little upsetting, Meador said in her understated way.
“I didn’t want anything in particular. I just thought something went wrong,” she said. “It was sort of unsettling, I’d say, to not be counted.”
Although, she can’t be certain she was counted in the 2000 Census, or for that matter, any of the previous nine.
“I don’t remember,” she said, laughing. “I may not even be listed as being born.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/09/2011