Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Genealogists! You Must See This
And non-genealogists will be amazed by it, too.
Today's NY Times has an interactive map that shows -- by COUNTY! -- where the immigrants came from in each decade, going back to 1880.
Take a look!
Update: An instructive thing to do is select a particular country from the drop-down menu in the upper left, then slide the date bar from 1880 to 2000 watching how the immigration pattern changes through the decades.
If you select Mexico, you will see the number of Mexican-born people gradually increase in the Southwest then, suddenly, they all but disappear in 1930. What happened? Did the Great Depression send them back to Mexico? Of course, in more recent years the Mexican immigration pattern explodes.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
That is so cool!
Thanks for the link. That map is really something. I checked Bremer County back in 1880, 1890, 1900.....the color shown is for Eastern Europe each time. I know Bremer Co. was settled heavily by Germans, so that color must indicate they came from an area that was considered East Germany?
Ted,
You are so right.
Jeannelle,
That's a good point. I don't consider Germany to be part of Eastern Europe, but of Central Europe. Luckily, there's a solution to that. If you go to the drop-down menu in the upper left corner, it will tell you what countries they're calling Eastern Europe: Germany, Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia. A strange call, I grant you, but at least we know.
You can select just Germany, then find Bremer County among the little bubbles in Iowa. In 1900, there were 2,150 people of German birth in a population of 16,305. If you check the other three "Eastern European" nations, nada. I'm betting those 2,150 had a lot of children.
Amazing to me that there were so many people from Western Europe coming in
around the late 1800's early 1900's.
I could see where my people came in from Canada.
Very interesting to look at!
Post a Comment