Travelers Count Too as Census Goes to Camp : Demographics: Workers from the Santa Ana bureau canvass the central county for untallied tourists.

Dan and Edna Barnes travel around the country in their 3-year-old silver camper for about six months of the year.

They enjoy constantly moving, but the retired Illinois couple ran the danger this year of going uncounted because they were away from home when their census form arrived.

The U.S. Census Bureau foresaw that.

The Barneses were among vacationers and travelers counted by more than two dozen census workers who roamed eight recreational vehicle and mobile home lots in central Orange County on Saturday evening--hours before the dawn of official Census Day. The effort by the bureau’s Santa Ana office was part of the statewide “T-day”--Transient Day--count Saturday.

Today is the deadline for people who received census forms to return them by mail.

“I think it’s a good idea for them to come to us,” Dan Barnes said, sitting in his camper parked in an RV lot in Anaheim. “We knew the count was going on with all the advertising and whatnot. But we’ve been on the road for about the last month and didn’t get the form.”

Census workers said that although T-Day also was held in 1980, this year’s effort was much more advanced.

“We put much more emphasis on making sure we find these people,” said Fernando Tafoyo, district manager. “With the increasing popularity of mobile home parks with short-term leases and campers, many Americans are moving around a great deal. And because areas like Anaheim have Disneyland and other attractions, you get a lot of extra people who might have been on the road for a while.”

Aside from campgrounds and mobile home parks, the census workers also surveyed YMCAs and YWCAs that rent rooms on a short-term basis.

“California is unique in that here the YMCA and YWCA rent to more people on long-term periods than short-term,” said Frank Fletcher, crew leader. “That made it difficult because we didn’t want to recount the same people that were counted on homeless night.” Census workers recently attempted to count the homeless by going to shelters and other gathering places.

To avoid counting people Saturday who might have already returned their census forms, workers asked the travelers if they have permanent homes and, if so, told them to mark a certain box on the form. The computer automatically throws out two forms from the same address.

Fletcher added that most of the time, people who move from spot to spot are not homeless or poor, just mobile.

“These people, for the most part, have resources unavailable to the majority of the homeless,” Fletcher said. “Today more people are just seeming to travel more.”

Lloyd and Dorthy Jones said they, too, would have been missed in the count if the census workers hadn’t come to them. They live in a RV with their three children and move from one trailer park to another every month or so, while they save enough money to buy a home.

“We haven’t had a permanent address for about a year now,” Dorthy Jones said from her camper, now parked in Anaheim, “so we knew they probably couldn’t find us to send a form. And I’ve been so busy I didn’t think much about trying to get one sent to us. But I know it’s important because it means better schools.”

Census officials said that determining how many people might occupy a particular spot is the toughest part of estimating the count.

CENSUS Q&A;:

Some answers to questions about those questionnaires. B15