Censuses are efficient methods for summarizing a community’s organization and individual’s place within that community. This page explains some standardized terms used in these censuses.

The census represents a snapshot in time. Each census should be treated as simultaneous, unless otherwise indicated (e.g., a census in a historical setting). Naturally, characters will deviate from this snapshot in more or less significant ways over the passage of time.

Household: Gives an address. All entries below a written address without a new address written live at the same location. This also suggests living arrangements and is strongly associated with family groups. It may also include renters, roommates, etc., which is clarified by the Name and Relationship entry.

Name: First name first, last name(s) second, middle names given after a comma. Aliases, alternate names, differences between legal names and used names may appear in the character’s personal info page. The name used in the census is the name that the person themself or the respondent (typically the head of household) provides. This is an authorial census, rather than a diegetic one, so it is the name I use for them, though it will typically be the same as the one the character uses for themselves in their own mind. Same with article titles. (goodness, im just gonna make this complicated at some point, aren’t i? some character who’s choice of name is just the most inconvenient thing.)

Relationship: Indicates head of household or relationship to head of household. The “head” is determined by who owns the property (or its lease). In the common event of coownership, nonresident owners will not be treated as the head, multiple residents may be marked as head with additional relationship notes, or one appropriate resident will be arbitrarily chosen as the head (i.e., dont read too much into it).

Age: given in Earth years because that’s what you use. Why would I make some abstract system up just so it can mean nothing to you, you know? Age is calculated within relativity, that is, based on the individual’s specific experience of time. A year is adjusted for the appropriate sensation of the passage of time within a given universe. Separately, some universes accelerate or decelerate maturation (i.e., an individual may have experienced more or less time than typically corresponds to their level of physical and cognitive development), which is better reflected in AgeFrame.

AgeFrame: AgeFrame is used to report more meaningful information than a simple yearcount, due to differences in development between species, access to medicine, and so on. The person is placed in a category, such as “child” or “adult”, based on cumulative physical development and compared against the projected lifespan of the species under similar circumstances and with similar medicine. Some terms may have specialized or uncommon terms for development, e.g., a pupal stage.

Origin: Origin refers to place of birth. For many individuals, this can be where they were raised, but not always. An individual’s page may provide more information. Origin may also be described at different levels of scale, e.g., a nomad’s origin will be the region their people hails from, unless that culture attaches special importance to certain places. Same for someone who is not nomadic, but lived throughout a region. Origins in little-understood regions may be much broader in scope than in well-understood areas.