Knowing just how many people were living on the land in a given place and time provides an important foundation and demographic context for understanding their lives. Comparing the Albany city population to that of Albany County and to the overall population of the colony helps us to see the early Albany story in larger contexts. Listed below are enumerated and estimated population figures for the province and then State of New York. 1664 ----9,000 1698 ----- 18,067 1703 ----- 20,665 1723 ----- 40,564 1731 ----- 50,289 1737 ----- 60,437 1749 ----- 73,448 1756 ----- 96,765 1771 ----- 168,007 1786 ----- 238,897 1820 ----- 1,372,812 Sources: These outstanding works chronicle existing population statistics: American Population Before the federal Census of 1790, by Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington (New York, 1932), 88-105, a colony-by-colony compendium of very useful population statistics; and Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton, NJ, 1975), an interesting analysis of those statistics. The core printed source for colonial New York census data is DHNY 1:687-97.
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