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 Some counties in certain MCD States contain territory, usually somewhat remote and sparsely populated, that is not part of any MCD. For States in which the township and range system of land survey existed, these areas usually were included in some governmentally nonfunctioning survey township. In other States, these expanses of territory often were unnamed, and identified in the census data tables as unorganized area, unsurveyed area, or balance of county.

These geographic areas posed problems in both the collection and the presentation of decennial census data. Enumerators had a hard time locating the boundaries of survey townships; moreover, the survey townships often were very numerous and usually too small in population to provide statistically reliable data from the questions asked on a sample basis. Names such as Township 69 and Range 21, or Fractional Township 70 and Range 18 cluttered the statistical tables and associated maps, and proved confusing to data users. In other situations, the unorganized area consisted of several discontiguous pieces of unnamed territory which posed problems in the decennial census data presentations. In 1970, the Census Bureau simplified its coverage of these areas by establishing a standard geographic entity, the UT, for data presentation purposes. By establishing UTs, the Census Bureau was able to simplify the nomenclature and improve the geographic pattern by using a smaller, more manageable number of subcounty entities.

In its statistical presentations, the Census Bureau has used a variety of administrative and governmental units to subdivide Alaska. The present set of primary and secondary geographic subdivisions dates from the 1970 census when the Census Bureau and State officials cooperatively established census divisions and census subdivisions as the county and subcounty equivalent geographic entities. In those parts of Alaska covered by boroughs (large-area governmental units with functions and powers similar to counties in the coterminous 48 States), the census divisions usually were the same as the boroughs, although in a few instances they included adjacent military County Subdivisions8-9