Bill Adams wrote:
I encourage each historical archaeologist to contribute to this effort as a
way of public education about historical archaeology. Many of us have
collected tidbits of information which could be posted to these county web
pages. If we conducted a project in the county, we owe it to the people
there to provide some information about the project. Please contact the
county supervisors listed on each page.
--
AMEN!
The challenge is to present that dry technical data in a form suitable for
public consumption.
For years I have been using primary sources such as census records, land
records, you name it to do my research. Essentially what I am doing is
local history but what I am really doing in a larger scope is an on-going
long-term archaeology / social history project studying everything from
historic land use patterns, community demographics, industrial archaeolgy,
site histories, biographies, historic structure surveys, ... in a single
community
While much of my data is in spreadsheets, typed notes and unpublished short
subject papers I have made a huge effort to complete small projects and
make this work available to the researching public.
Rootsweb has helped make that all possible and my pages have 30-40 visitors
a day and have led professional researchers and scholars from all over the
globe to me and my work
I do all of this work from the point of view of a research archaeologist or
historian, but most of the material I use is the same stuff that
genealogists use. Unfortunately my statistical collections are pretty
useless to the man on the street, so I have re-formatted them for handy use
by genealogists and other avocational researchers, and thus my web pages
are packed full of material that I have been working with and took a little
bit of extra time to make it available.
Researchers are amazed that I can pull tons of data out of a magical hat,
but it is simply (!) that I have taken the time to enter it all into the
computer in a way that is easily managable easily compared and easily
regurgitated (I use only Excel spreadsheets and WordPerfect). I can
usually respond to questions within a few hours and many who write to me
think that I have been actively researching their particular family when in
fact I am researching every family in the three town area. For me, every
question is an opportunity to learn more and I relish the opportunities to
look into questions that I would otherwise would have never asked.
Here is an example of the kind of stuff I can put together when the unique
opportunity arises. I was asked by a researcher about the cholera
epidemic that swept across NY State in 1832. Total composition time 4 hours:
The 1832 Cholera Epidemic in an Upland Community in Central New York
Daniel H. Weiskotten
January, 2001
(written in response to inquiry from William Beardslee)
I deal with rural upland communities and they were not hit hard by the
epidemic,
but I did do the looking anyway. I have compiled stats on deaths from over
60 cemeteries, newspapers, church records, and census records (I have not
yet included the New Woodstock Cemetery). Unfortunately the newspaper
records for Cazenovia are lost for the period of 1828-1843, so many
obituaries that would be useful are not available. Cemetery records
present a large but incomplete picture as many grave markers never survived
to the present day.
Generally, my analysis did not identify any clear evidence of the epidemic
in the Cazenovia, Fenner and Nelson mortality data. Annual mortality
according to census records was about 13 per thousand in 1835 and slowly
decreasing to 8 per thousand in 1870 (it rose to 14 per thousand in 1880!).
I have not yet calculated yearly rates of death for ther other years in
this period and will rely on strictly hard data from the cemetery and other
records. There were a total of 118 deaths noted in the 1835 census. In
the period of 1829-1835 there were no fewer than 39 deaths per year known
from the cemetery and other local records and no more than 69, with an
average number of about 52 annually. The high was 69 in 1831. There were
46 deaths in 1829, 39 in 1830, 56 in 1832, and 50 in 1833, 57 in 1834, and
44 in 1835 - the numbers are not large but they do not show much variation.
Seasonality of death is also not clearly differentiated in the years
surrounding the epidemic. There was an average of only 3.8 deaths per
month for the period of October 1831 to December 1833. Two periods had a
notably higher rate of death than normal, mid 1832 and winter 1832/1833
(March 1832 [n=7], August 1832 [n=6], January 1833 [n=7], March 1833 [n=9]
and April 1833 [n=8]). Conversely, two other periods, Fall 1832 and March
1833 onward, had a lower than average number of deaths per month.
Aside from showing that the 1832 cholera epidemic did not abnormally affect
the local mortality rates, my research has made most clear is that we do
not know where the
majority of our dead from the early years of settlement (1793-1860) lie
buried. While the population of the three towns of Cazenovia, Fenner, and
Nelson reached its zenith in the 1830s (there was a steady decline through
to the 1940s when it has slowly risen and has now surpased the 1830 levels)
there are relatively few burials known for these times. The 1835 census
notes that there were 118 deaths in a population of 8850 people, but using
cemetery and other records I have been able to identify the burial places
or dates of only 44 individuals. Where the other 74 dead reside is not know.
Here are selected links to a very small portion of the material I present
on my pages:
http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyccazen/
http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyccazen/Cemeteries/Fenner/BallouCem.html
http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyccazen/Census/
http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyccazen/Census/DeRuyter/1800DeRuyterRoute.html
http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyccazen/VitalStats/1855CensusDeaths.html
http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyccazen/Shorts/Questions/Owahgena.html
http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyccazen/TaxLists/CazTown/1805Assessment.html
Dan W.
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