Conrad Taeuber and Irene Barnes Taeuber

Conrad Taeuber and Irene Barnes Taeuber (respectively, born June 15, 1906, Hosmer, S.D., U.S.—died Sept. 11, 1999, Nashua, N.H.; born Dec. 25, 1906, Meadville, Mo., U.S.—died Feb. 24, 1974, Hyattsville, Md.) were American demographers, statisticians, and social scientists whose scholarly work helped found the science of demography and made them authorities on population movements in the United States.

Conrad Taeuber was educated at the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., 1931). He held a number of positions in government service, including economic analyst in the Federal Emergency Relief agency (1934–35), economist in the Department of Agriculture (1935–40), principal social scientist and acting head of farm population and rural welfare in the Department of Agriculture (1942–43), and head economist in the Department of Agriculture (1943–46). He worked for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (1946–51) and the U.S. Census Bureau (assistant director, 1951–68; associate director, 1968–73). From 1973–85 he was the senior professor of demography at the Kennedy Institute of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. After he married Irene Barnes, they collaborated on their work in the field of demography and on two publications considered standard works in the field.

Irene Barnes received her B.A. (1927) from the University of Missouri, her M.A. (1928) from Northwestern University, and her Ph.D. (1931) from the University of Minnesota. She married Conrad Taeuber in 1929, and they shared a professional interest in government statistics and demography until her death in 1974. Irene Taeuber became research associate in the Office of Population Research at Princeton University (1936–61), and then senior research demographer (1962–74). While director of the census library project for the Library of Congress and the Bureau of the Census (1941–44), she wrote General Censuses and Vital Statistics in America (with F.W. Notestein, 1943) and The Population of Europe and the Soviet Union (1943). The Population of Japan (with Conrad Taeuber, 1958) and The Changing Population of the United States (with Conrad Taeuber, 1958) are classics in demography. Her articles written for Population Index, a journal she edited from 1937 to 1954, are similarly valuable.