Median Family Income by County: 1950-2012

I was interested in geographical economic capital flows in the U.S., but had no idea how to search for it, since Googling for "United States," "geography" and "capital" just kept giving me the state capitols. So with some inspiration from some FB friends, I grabbed some Census data, spent 2 days hand-transcribing some old PDFs from the pre-computer era, and created this GIF. It's median family income by county from 1950-2012. From what I can tell, there is no county-level data prior to this. I could be wrong, feel free to correct me. The red are the poorest areas that year, and the green are the richest areas.

I used QGIS to make the maps, Excel to manipulate the data, OpenOffice to bring the Excel data into a format QGIS could use, and Paint Shop Pro, Animation Shop to make the GIF.