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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
The high rate of population turnover in nineteenth-century North American cities no longer requires emphasis. However, students of historical migration have progressed very little beyond merely documenting its existence. As a result, the relationship of social, economic, and demographic factors to migration remains imperfectly understood, and the extent to which rates of population movement varied with economic growth, population size, or other factors still is a matter of conjecture.
In another essay, we began the systematic exploration of population movement through an analysis of patterns in Buffalo and rural Erie County, New York, in 1855. The 1855 New York state census recorded how long each individual had lived in the place in which he or she was enumerated. Using this information, and correcting for mortality, we developed estimates of population persistence and of the determinants of length of residence, which are two conceptually distinct phenomena. We compared both to patterns in Hamilton, Ontario, during the same period and, less systematically, to what historians reported for other places. We concluded that the rate of population persistence in Buffalo was higher than in a number of other cities, and we attributed the difference to the dynamism of the city’s economic life, compared especially to Hamilton in the same years. Nonetheless, despite differences in rates of persistence, the social and demographic correlates of length of residence were strikingly similar in each city and in the countryside as well.
The research in this paper was supported with funds from Canada Council Grant S 75-1536 and NIMH Grant #R0 1 MH 27850.
1 On population turnover see Thernstrom, Stephan and Knights, Peter R., “Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1 (1970), 18–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For other studies which reveal the same phenomenon see: Malin, James C., “The Turnover of Farm Population in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, 4 (1935), 339–72Google Scholar; Chudacoff, Howard, Mobile Americans: Residential and Social Mobility in Omaha, 1880-1920 (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Gagan, David and Mays, Herbert, “Historical Demography and Canadian Social History: Families and Land in Peel County, Ontario,” The Canadian Historical Review, 54 (1973), 35–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katz, Michael B., The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, 1975), ch. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Esslinger, Dean R., Immigrants and the City: Ethnicity and Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century Midwestern Community (Port Washington, New York, 1975), 41–44Google Scholar. Two useful reviews of relevant contemporary literature are: Hollingworth, T. H., “Historical Studies of Migration,” Annates de Demographie Historique 1970 (Paris and the Hague, 1970), 87–96Google Scholar, and Simmons, James W., “Changing Residence in the City: A Review of Intraurban Mobility,” The Geographical Review, 58 (1968), 622–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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7 Haines, Michael R., “Mortality in Nineteenth Century America: Estimates from New York and Pennsylvania Census Data, 1861,” unpublished paper (Cornell University, 1977)Google Scholar. We wish to thank Professor Haines for providing us unpublished life-tables based upon his research. For his published tables see, “Mortality in Nineteenth Century America: Estimates from New York and Pennsylvania Census Data, 1865 and 1900” Demography, 14: 3 (1977), 311-31.
8 Katz, Michael B. and Davey, Ian E., “Youth and Early Industrialization in a Canadian City,” in Boocock, Sarane and Demos, John, eds., Turning Points: Essays in the History and Sociology of the Family (Chicago, forthcoming, 1978).Google Scholar
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10 We have borrowed the useful concept of “life-cycle service” from Laslett, Peter, “Characteristics of the Western Family Considered over Time,” Journal of Family History, 2 (June 1977), 89–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Katz, Doucet, and Stern, “Migration and the Social Order.”
12 Doucet, “Building the Victorian City,” 227-31.
13 Katz, Doucet, and Stern, “Migration and the Social Order.”
14 Andrews, Frank M. et al., Multiple Classification Analysis: A Report on a Computer Program for Multiple Regression using Categorical Predictors (Ann Arbor, 1973)Google Scholar. We used the MCA program in SPSS, which limits the number of factor variables to five and has a provision for co-variates. On this program see, Nie, Norman H., et al., SPSS: Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., (New York, 1975), 409-10, 416–18Google Scholar. Interaction effects can pose a problem for the interpretation of MCA results. We have attempted to check for major interactions through combining variables in different ways, partitioning files, and testing directly. Interaction effects do not alter the major conclusions offered in the text, and for clarity we have chosen to present the most straightforward accurate table. In the MCA here, we have made no attempt to construct formal causal models. Rather, we have used regression-type analysis for purposes of “estimation.” The complexity of our dependent variable’s inter-relations with other factors is such that recursive models (one-way causality) are out of the question. Thus, our ordinary least squares estimations are addressed to questions of the relative predictive value of certain variables. In other analyses of wealth, occupation, and homeownership we have used “persisted since 1861” as an independent variable in a similar manner.
15 Master artisans and manufacturers were identified from the business directories of Hamilton and from the 1871 Census of Industry.
16 Doucet, “Building the Victorian City,” 51-53 and 240-46.
17 We have developed this critique in our “Migration and the Social Order.” On the relation between mobility and economic context see, Broadman, Anthony E. and Weber, Michael P., “Economic Growth and Occupational Mobility in Nineteenth-Century Urban America: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Social History, 11:1 (Fall 1977), 52–74.Google Scholar
18 The most notable pursuit of out-migrants has been undertaken by Peter Knights. Richard Jensen and Charles Stephenson also have begun important work in this area for the United States, as have Michael Ornstein and Gordon Darroch in Canada.