Frontier Melting Pot ? _ Colorado in 1900

In 1900, Colorado must still have been quite the frontier. Electricity had been harnessed on the East Coast, trains had been crossing the nation for decades, and Henry Ford was building cars, so presumably it wouldn't have been the covered wagon kind of frontier _ but perhaps a frontier all the same.

In any event, it surely seems to have been an example of the melting pot the United States is credited with being _ there seems to have been greater diversity in Colorado in 1900 than in, say, Mississippi, or Kentucky, or even Ohio. In one list of 50 Colorado residents, birthplaces included Maine, Vermont, New York and North Carolina, for example, as well as Poland, Norway, Italy, England, Wales, Germany, Scotland and Canada.

I have been transcribing records from the 1900 federal census. It's a project developed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints . When completed, the results will be available free online; somehwat similar but more limited 1900 records are available now, but for a fee. The LDS already has a huge genealogy site, which also is free and accessible online. Presumably, its origin lies in one of the tenets of Mormon beliefs. I'm only one of thousands of volunteers doing the transcription in what obviously is a major undertaking. A recent note said more than 7 million names were turned in in April or May (I forget which month), and that that was nearly double the number submitted the previous month. One doesn't have to be Mormon to participate (I'm not); anyone can help.

I just finished a page of 50 names moments ago and _ thinking of the recent Ragodos rant _ I decided I'd post some of the thoughts I've been having while fogging my way through the transcriptions. Some might consider it a near-mindless job, compiling list after list of names, dates and places of people long dead, but I find my imagination and emotions stirred in a variety of ways. Names remind me of people I've known, and situations, and circumstances _ sometimes mundane, sometimes pleasant, sometimes amusing, but sometimes disquieting. My parents were born about five years after the turn of that century, and my mother died shortly after the turn of THIS century, so 1900 isn't really all that long ago to me despite its being 107 years in the past.

And I can tell you that there really were people with such names as Clementine, Almira, Gussie and Evangeline. Folk were named Thankful, and Charity, and Pleasant, and Faith. With more than 11,000 on my scorecard, I forget the best examples almost as quickly as I type them, but think of a name you've always considered odd, and it probably once was almost commonplace. What REALLY were commonplace are all the Marys, Johns, Toms, Williams, Lizzies, Anns and Kates! And, in some locales, Jacobs, Abrahams, Isaacs and Isiahs lived cheek to jowl. I've an impression there were more Jobs than Lukes or Marks, but Mathew, Matthew and Mathias show up frequently, for that matter.

Folk of a kind _ that is, of an ethnicity _ apparently tended to live together in bunches, it seems _ the bunches may have scattered across this sprawling country, but they flocked together either in the traveling or when they got to where they were going. In Colorado, which is the site on which I've been working the last two or three nights, I've transcribed whole communities of Hispanics, for instance. Others were Italian. Some were Chinese. Sometimes there would be a string of boarding houses with everyone being from Austria or from Poland _ or from Canada. For Canada, by the way, enumerators distinguished between Canada_Eng and Canada-Fr *s* _ and rare was a family with one of each. In Ohio, it would be Germans, and typically would be of one of the early fundamental Protestant faiths such as a group of Anabaptists, or Mennontes, or Lutherans. In this most recent Colorado page, there's a string of divorced or widowed women living alone side by side, and I wonder with a smile whether that too was a "community" of sorts.

I'm working from digital photocopies of the records, not from originals. That means all I can see is what the photographer managed to capture _ and sometimes that's incredibly little. These records, understandably, vary widely in quality _ after all, sometimes virtually all of a given year's census reports were destroyed by fire, or sometimes those for a given locality. Some of the pages I've transcribed looked like maybe they were on the water-soaked fringes of just such an event. Argggh! Some have large inkblots, some have been patched with tape _ or, once were patched with tape that left a big rectangular blotch exactly over the part I need to discern. Even when beautifully preserved, there's still the handwriting to decipher _ and that can be daunting and occasionally impossible.

One may think of the lovely "copperplate" style of handwriting that still was prevalent at the time, and occasional pages could serve as textbook examples. Some are written with a broad-nibbed pen and look like Olde English or German Black Text calligraphy. Others remind me of my own rotten writing _ or of that of a theater history professor under whom I once studied: His comments were marvelously insightful, if one only could read them! Thank goodness someone reviews the pages I turn in, since I rather doubt that "Crpnnst" is really a name, but that's as close as I could come even after enlarging the photo image and adding my own handheld magnifying glass. I wish I readily could post some of the examples _ but since I can't, think of whether a wavy humpy line is a series of r's, a series of n's, a series of m's, or some combination of e's, r's,'n's, m's, u's, o's and/or a's _ siiiigh. I see capital M's and W's that are virtually indistinguishable, but thank goodness that "Wichael" is more likely to be "Michael"! I do well enough with the more common names _ such as those I mentioned earlier _ but a seeming certainty is that there's always at least five weird ones per page. Figuring out the Slavic and Russian names can be especially tricky, since there isn't necessarily a vowel in a given syllable.

I find myself wondering about these people whose names I'm compiling _ their lives, how they came to have traveled from Maine or Vermont all those miles across the country. And since I'm dealing with such data as their ages, whether they are married, how many children they had and when _ and where, I can't help but notice some uncommon aspects. A man born in Italy of Germanic parents marries an Irish-born lass whose parents were from England and Wales _ or Scotland. They have a daughter born in Alsace, and the next child is born in New York _ during the year in which they immigrated. Was the mother pregnant while on the ship? And then the NEXT child is born in Nebraska and the one a year after that, in Colorado. As I work, I remember that I once turned down a teaching job because my wife feared living 80 miles from her parents when our first child was to be born. And I marvel at both sets of circumstances before I type another line with its hint and reminder of yet another story.

I sometimes get caught up in concern that's obviously undue, since the folk don't even exist any more, but is still inescapable. In transcribing some Mississippi and Tennessee records, I saw a woman who had 16 children, of whom only 4 survived. I saw men married at 15, and women at 13 on occasion _ that is, assuming the dates given were correct, which itself is problematic. I even saw one instance in which the dates would have the mother married at age 10! I saw several situations in which a woman repeatedly had children 9 months apart _ and while thinking of what an ordeal she had had, I also wondered why in the world they couldn't figure out why it was happening *g* ! And why the guy couldn't have waited another week or two, for heaven's sake! I see other instances in which a couple is married for 19 or 33 years and has had no children. And while I wonder just why, I also grin while wondering what the wife's contraceptive secret was, since this was waaaay before The Pill.

I see lots and lots of unmarrieds, men and women at 30-something and 40-something. It's about that long since thousands upon thousands died in the Civil War, and I wonder if that's a factor. I see women living alone as heads of household, and wonder whether they were suspect in the eyes of society at the time. I saw one instance in which a 40-something woman was running either a boarding house for single women _ or a bordello! There were a dozen or more women from everywhere under the sun, all in their late teens and early 20s *smirk*. Older unmarried folk usually are widows or widowers, and they usually either are living with the family of one of their children, or _ as heads of their own households _ have a bunch of their still-single children living with them. Occasionally I see someone listed as divorced _ still something of a rarity in 1900, and presumably frowned upon. I see an occasional person in 70s or 80s living alone. I see folk listed as servants at age 13 and 9. I see blacks as boarders in white households, but no whites as boarders in black households. And, just one page ago, for the first time, I saw a mixed marriage _ a white guy with a black wife. They had no children.

Enough of this, Fresh coffee and back to work:

Kjeskbo, Lena ... Boarder ... W F (born) May 1886 (she's 14 and a boarder?) in Colorado to a father born in Norway and a mother born in Germany

Martinelli, Fidell ... Head ... W M (born) June 1862 ......

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