Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources

Peter Baskerville and Kris Inwood, eds., Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources (McGill‐Queens University Press 2015) ISBN: 9780773544673 Introduction Each of the papers in this collection illustrates the emerging field of longitudinal research from historical records. The field draws from several distinct methodological traditions. Before reviewing the contributions of each paper it is useful to situate our vision of the field within a broad intellectual context. For many people the most familiar historical genre is biography, or fashioning a narrative of someone’s life. Most biographers draw from a wide variety of sources some of which are rich in detail and context. We can extend the idea of following one person through her or his life to a group of individuals, or collective biography. Looking at a large number of people, however, makes it difficult to use the same number and diversity of sources for each individual. Collective biography therefore tends to focus on particular dimensions of life and to rely on sources that are less rich individually. The advantage, of course, is being able to compare different kinds of people and to generalize across the experience of many people rather than being restricted to the one person who happened to leave behind the sources needed for a biography. An important step in the development of collective biography was the emergence of the collection and analysis of ‘cohort’ data during the early decades of the twentieth century. A typical study in this genre collected information from a selected group of people at multiple points through their lives in order to develop generalizations on topics of interest to social and medical science. There was some reliance on retrospective data collection but since everyone being studied was still alive, the most useful information was that emerging from the process of monitoring the cohort of individuals as their lives unfolded. The genre continues and indeed has had a renaissance of sorts in recent decades as interest has grown in research about childhood, old age, labour market transitions and the early life origins of adult health. Most important national statistical agencies now maintain a longitudinal survey, which is updated on a continuous basis. Separately, researchers in historical demography have engaged in ‘population reconstruction’, often within a local community or parish, in order to follow a set of individuals in the past from cradle to grave. Very often the analytical purpose of this research was to compare the experience of the entire life-course in one generation to that of the next, and to assess the socio-economic circumstances in which one generation married early or later, had fewer or more children, etc. A related although conceptually distinct genre of research examines a large number of people at a single point in time or in a single source. Here the cross-sectional variety of personal characteristics and circumstance allows rich analysis of individual-level experience that contributes to and is influenced by a group process. The availability of successive cross-sectional snapshots permits a related genre of ‘synthetic’ cohorts in which the lifetime experience of a group of people is understood by extracting information from two cross-sectional snapshots in a way that ensures maximum comparability. A synthetic cohort analysis might compare at different points in time people with the same birthdate, for example 15 year-olds in 1985 are compared with 35 year olds in 2005. Here we are comparing the same kinds of people at different dates, rather than following exactly the same people through their lives. The latter, a true cohort analysis is more precise insofar as entrance into the group (immigration) or exit (death, emigration) does not influence outcomes. In recent years all genres of research have acquired the power to address larger and larger databases, as the cost of data acquisition has diminished, and the power of hardware and software to store and analyze the data has increased. The number and size of crosssectional databases have increased to the point that is now possible to employ computer science-based techniques of data mining or machine learning that will identify exactly the same people in two large bodies of data. Observing someone in two databases, at different times, effectively creates longitudinal data for that individual. And because we can do this for thousands and millions of people, we are able to generate longitudinal or cohort data on a large scale. The process relies critically on advanced computing capacity and techniques. It would not be possible for an individual, even someone very hard-working, to review and identify matches, that is finding the same people in two sources, if the relevant sources are 100 million records of the 1900 United States census and 120 million records from 1910. The right computer software, however, can do it. Many of the papers in this volume draw from this kind of methodology to generate large samples of cohort or longitudinal data for past populations. The book begins with an examination of the lives of women and men who travelled from Britain to the south Pacific during the nineteenth century. The movement of British people to Australia and New Zealand was the longest and most arduous of all the nineteenth century migrations. The voyage was challenging in different ways for those who were transported as convicts, the subject of the first two papers, and those who decided freely to migrate, who are considered in the third paper. The first paper by Kippen and McCalman reconstructs the lives of men transported to Van Dieman’s land during the late 1820s and 1830s. The authors draw upon a collaboration with genealogists and other volunteers that has digitized and linked together extensive British government information about each of the convicts. In this paper Kippen and McCalman overturn a widely-held belief of Australians about their past. The authors argue that the transported convicts were not typical English, Scots, Welsh and Irish of the sort beginning to migrate freely to the Australian colonies at this time. Rather, the temperament, behaviour and moral quality of convicts were conspicuously problematic following impoverished early lives and the compounding effects of subsequent experience. Kippen and McCalman develop a window into the character of transported convicts through a structured comparison of 330 rural workers imprisoned for protesting a loss of land with more typical convicts whose offences were theft and related crimes. The lives of both groups are reconstructed in remarkable detail. The men imprisoned for political protest escaped the worst excesses of physical and psychological punishment and won their freedom more quickly. The transgressions of the more typical prisoner prior to and within the convict system exposed him to severe physical and psychological punishments and longer sentences that, cumulatively, created considerable stress. Both character and experience contributed to a reduction in the prospects for marriage and an increased risk of early death for the convicts. This persuasive challenge to one of the foundational myths of Australian history would not be possible without the information resources of the larger project, a sophisticated combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis and the conceptual framework of life-course analysis. Maxwell-Stewart joins with Kippen to examine sickness and death on the voyage to Australia and after arrival. They show that while early nineteenth-century ship travel was hazardous to health especially on long voyages, medical regulation and support made convict voyages safer than the maritime experience of free or voluntary migrants. This is unexpected because it is generally believed that doctors and medical knowledge at the time had little to offer. Travel in winter months was less healthy but, another surprise, crowding aboard ship did not seem to affect the risk of sickness and/or death. The authors observe a remarkable pattern of gender differences. The ships carrying female convicts had a higher mortality rate but the risk of death in the months after arrival in Australia was greater for men. The presence of children and accompanying diarrheal disease on the female convict voyages provides part of the explanation. Equally interesting, though, is the insight afforded by a longitudinal perspective. By following large numbers of individual convicts over time Kippen and Maxwell-Stewart show that women were typically in poor health before boarding the ships – because of their social class and living conditions, because of gender discrimination in their home lives and because many travelled longer and farther than men in order to reach the port. Male convicts may have been healthier than women before boarding and on the voyage, but the severe punishment regime for men after arrival damaged their life prospects disproportionately. The third article in this section, by Rebecca Lenihan, again builds on collaboration with genealogists, in this case following the lives of many thousands of Scots who moved to New Zealand. This migrant flow was especially important for both countries as European settlers in New Zealand were disproportionately Scottish. Lenihan argues that while the sheer length of the voyage understandably focuses attention on the oceanic passage, a careful examination of migrant lives reveals a complex and more varied pattern. A large number of migrants moved within Scotland at least once before departure or travelled elsewhere in the British Empire before settling in New Zealand. Many families relocated one or more times after arrival in New Zealand, and some returned to Scotland. Lenihan’s life-course perspective allows her to argue that, for many, migration was more than a long and hazardous voyage. Rather, migration was a multi-step experience encountering obstacles and complications that stretched over several years and often involved interim settlement in other countries and family relocations at home and in the country of eventual settlement. In Australia and New Zealand, as elsewhere in the overseas British Empire, more people lived in rural areas than in towns and cities. It is therefore particularly appropriate to focus on rural people and the experience of agricultural change. Papers in the second section of the book examine rural areas of North America. Three papers examine spatial and social mobility in Ontario and Canada between 1860 and 1880, and the final paper by Sylvester and Leonard focuses on land tenure changes in Kansas 1874-1941. Gordon Darroch, author of the first paper in this section, was in the forefront of those who questioned an older literature which had argued that as early as the 1860s large numbers of people moved out of agriculture and into more ‘modern’ manufacturing jobs. In this paper Darroch revisits the flow of people into and out of occupations in the 1860s and looks as well at the degree to which this social mobility was accompanied by movement across space. Darroch suggests that the traditional—“long in the tooth”-argument that movement into farm ownership was akin to climbing the rungs of a single ladder one step at a time is both overly simple and somewhat whiggish or, in Darroch’s words,—“a rather unadorned upward mobility thesis.” Using one of the first large longitudinal databases ever constructed—some 14,000 people who lived in central Ontario in 1861 who were found on the census living in central Ontario in 1871--, Darroch uncovers a “culture of mobility”, both spatial and social. Not only did men from all walks of life change their jobs over the decade but they also changed their residences. New jobs went hand in hand with new living quarters. A large number moved into farming but, as Darroch notes, 20 percent of farmers became non-farmers over the decade. By linking a large number of individuals across time, Darroch demonstrates that movement into farming occurred from many directions-from the labouring segment, native born, immigrants, tenants, farmer’s sons, and even merchants. Thus he suggests that the dominant metaphor of a single ladder needs to be modified, if not discarded. There were many possible ladders to scale or paths to traverse as individuals sought out new employment opportunities and new places to set up a home. Antonie et al pursue similar questions for the decade of the 1870s with a sample of 32,699 people found on the 1871 national census who were linked to the 1881 national census. They outline the construction of this first Canadian national database of linked individuals and employ the data to examine change versus continuity in work patterns. The central intent is to reconcile aggregate occupational evidence which points to little if any change over the decade with a large literature that argues for significant economic change. Their linked database uncovered patterns of movement not visible from crosssectional snapshots even if organized on a synthetic cohort basis. While the longitudinal data point to a degree of occupational stability, they also reveal significant movement by younger people out of farming and into commerce and industry, a very different pattern from that exhibited by older men. Ethnic differences are also uncovered. Continental Europeans chose agriculture more consistently than other ethnic groups. Those of Scottish origin led the way into industry. The linked data confirm, though, that farming remained the most attractive occupational choice and that relatively few left over the course of the decade. Younger men were more likely to change presaging a different future within a broader context of continuity. Baskerville employs a database of linked individuals to examine who was most likely to move residences over the decade of the 1870s. His unit of analysis—555 household heads from one rural township, Logan, Perth County, Ontario—is smaller than that of Darroch’s and Antonie’s et al but his data are hand linked to all of Canada and the United States, not just to the county or even the province as a whole. It is local in terms of the study group, but international in terms of the linkage scope. The paper emphasizes that linkage decisions and the size of catchment areas are crucial determinants of valid conclusions. In contrast to many small area studies, he finds less movement across time, although the extent of such mobility is still striking. He also suggests that the dominant explanation for movement offered in the traditional literature, one that emphasizes economic reasons, needs qualification. Cultural issues were, arguably, for many settlers in Logan Township, more important determinants underlying decisions to move or stay put. Finally he shows that tenancy could be a multi-faceted process, one that requires deconstruction if its impact on settlers’ decisions is to be clearly understood. Sylvester and Leonard employ a linked database of all farm households in 25 townships in the State of Kansas between 1875 and 1940 to examine the changing nature of landed inequality. They note that from the perspective of a single census “it has always been difficult to sort out the effect of period and generational change in understanding the patterns of American inequality.” Their database, constructed from state agricultural censuses for every half decade, allow them to move beyond snapshots to uncover the dynamics of longitudinal change. They find that throughout most of their study area those families that came first controlled the destinies of later generations. As the authors note, even single census snapshots point to age stratified ownership rates, but their longitudinal approach casts a clearer light on the social processes at work overtime. In the early years, with a relative abundance of open land, farm sizes fell thus facilitating ownership at lower age levels. When available land became scarce the social process of farm growth changed little: the persistence of modest farm sizes, even in areas where wheat farming would have accommodated an expansion of farm size, permitted, at least for family members, continued, if somewhat delayed, access to ownership. These trends were most visible in the townships that exhibited the greatest degree of farm household persistence. That persistence was accompanied by a culture of familial entitlement, manifested by social parity in farm size. In the case of Kansas cultural determinants mitigated inequalities in land ownership. Most North Americans lived in rural communities but urban populations were growing. Olson and Roberts trace the intra-city spatial and social movements of residents of two of North America’s major urban centres, Montreal and Chicago, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both authors carefully guide the reader through the process of constructing databases composed of individuals linked across space and time. The strengths and limits of these databases are clearly outlined. Readers are given a fascinating and in many ways an unprecedented moving picture of urban residents striving to succeed in conditions not totally of their own making. Using a “dyadic” strategy--searching for people in pairs--, Olson linked 40,000 Montreal residents from the 1881 census to the 1901 census (one-third of estimated survivors); many of these are also linked to marriage and tax records. The resultant database allows her to trace spatial and social movements within the city over a generation. That in itself is a worthy achievement, but Olson desires to escape the census’ rigid focus on the household as unit of analysis in order to explore links between census households. Previous studies of social movement within Montreal over a five-year time span have suggested that 25 percent of the population moved every five years but only 20 percent seemed to have moved ‘up’ in a social/economic sense. Her study of movement over nearly a generation confirms the high propensity to move to a different neighbourhood (5 out of 6 did so over the 20 year period). In contrast to the short-term studies, Olson finds significant upward mobility of a social/economic sort over 20 years. Her principal evidence is that the large majority of moves were to streets of higher median rent. This finding also stands in contrast to many studies of mobility in the United States and Britain in the later years of the nineteenth century, studies which, as Roberts notes, have charted declining social mobility. Perhaps most exciting is Olson’s focus on “near-residence”: who lived close to whom. Linking by pairs within individual households in 1881 allows her to see where these people lived in 1901. She finds that one-half of her 20,000 households were themselves linked to another household by a close relationship to two or more people. For half of these linked households the distance between them constituted a short six minute walk. This desire for close kin to be close neighbours spanned the city and crossed the three cultural communities that made up Montreal: the French Catholics, Irish Catholics and Protestants. Lastly Olson notes that those individuals who were between the ages of 15 to 24 in 1881 were the most difficult to find in 1901. Antonie et al and many other projects have encountered the same problem. Rather than simply ignoring them, however, Olson makes the valuable point that this is a generation “at risk” and charts the many ways that that was the case. Olson’s employment of a longitudinal perspective provides richly nuanced insights into the strategies and challenges that faced Montreal’s residents as the nineteenth century came to a close and a new century commenced. Roberts’ study of a group of working class men and their families in Chicago utilizes a 1925 survey questionnaire with some 477 respondents. The survey was one of many at the time undertaken to investigate the social conditions and living standards of working class families. Again in common with other such surveys, the 1925 data exist as a snap shot at a point in time. Roberts enriches the survey considerably by linking 277 of these families to the 1930 census. The longitudinal data allow him to comment on residential and social change over time. Indeed his study is one of only a few that employ longitudinal analysis to uncover social mobility in the early twentieth century United States. Roberts finds that the sample families compare well with similar families enumerated in the 1920 census and can be seen to be representative of other working class families in Chicago at that time. He finds that spatial movement was extensive and almost totally within the city. Indeed median rent increased; one third of the renters in 1825 owned their own homes in 1930. Both changes point to increased social mobility. But, Roberts’ cautions, most still rented in 1930. Moreover, occupational change although dramatic across the five years (80 percent were in different occupations or industries by 1930) does not point to general social improvement. While many did move from unskilled to skilled jobs just as many moved from skilled to unskilled positions. Wives and children continued to work over the five years and boarding remained a significant source of income. These continuities point to the constrained nature of any upward social mobility in the later 1920s. Roberts’ study is the first to employ longitudinal analysis at a micro urban level for the early twentieth century United States. It awaits other studies for comparative analysis. The final section examines ethnically-defined groups who participated in the First World War. The first two papers, as with Roberts and Olson in the previous section, connect individuals in the census to another source, in this case military personnel records. Another methodological difference is that these two papers do not provide a narrative of people moving through their life-courses. Rather, they bring together information collected at different points to provide a richer cross-sectional profile and evaluate select hypotheses about French-Canadian and aboriginal soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Neither paper could resolve the issues under examination without observing people at different points in their lives and in different sources. The final paper by Bogaert, Van Koeverden and Herring does follow people through time in a profoundly interesting narrative of the Polish Army in North America. In the first paper Cranfield and Inwood demonstrate that for as long as we can measure the French-origin population in Canada has been shorter than other North Americans. Towards the end of the twentieth century the difference diminishes greatly but is still visible. The authors believe that stature or height is not just an idiosyncratic personal circumstance; for a large enough group it can be an informative marker of standard of living. Cranfield and Inwood find no evidence of systematic genetic differences so the most likely explanation is socio-economic stratification and the inferior social position of French-Canadians. The authors link military records for a set of soldiers to the 1901 census, which provides additional information needed to permit a sophisticated econometric test. Somewhat surprisingly, the socio-economic factors explain only a small share of the difference in stature. This redirects attention to cultural factors and perhaps a reconsideration of the genetic hypothesis. Aboriginal and mixed-race soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War One (WWI) are examined by Fryxell, Inwood and van Tassell. The authors take advantage of the unusually thorough 1901 Canadian census and linking from census to WWI records to identify Aboriginal and mixed-race soldiers whether or not they selfidentified as Indigenous at the time of enlistment.1 Thus the authors are able to examine, for the time, Indian soldiers who did not have reserve status as well as those recognized officially as members of a treaty band. The new linked census-military data reveal similarities and differences between Aboriginal and other Canadian soldiers, as well as considerable diversity among the First Nations - regionally and between mixed-race and pure-bloods. The mixed-race men had a particularly high enlistment rate. 88% of the pure-blooded and one-third of the mixed-race Indians spoke an indigenous language as their mother tongue; collectively the Indigenous soldiers had 31 different native languages and five European languages as a mother tongue. The authors argue for the importance of recognizing the contribution of mixed-race soldiers and for the enormous diversity of Aboriginal contribution during the war. The final paper by Bogaert, Van Koeverden and Herring tells the story of WWI Polish Army troops who came from across North America to train at Niagara on the Lake during 1917 and 1918. The authors assemble their narrative of the Polish Army training camp at Niagara on the Lake from a variety of qualitative and quantitative sources. The story told by Bogaert, Van Koeverden and Herring has bittersweet resonance because the movement of Polish recruits helped to bring the deadly 1918 influenza epidemic to Canada. In their account the authors intertwine the diffusion of influenza with recruitment and training during the latter stages of the war. At Niagara on the Lake many hundreds of Polish soldiers were struck down by flu, and 25 died. Annual ceremonies to remember the camp and its casualties continue to commemorate the importance of these contributions to Polish identity and nationalism. The story of the Polish Army camp at Niagara on the Lake reminds us that longitudinal history unfolds in days and weeks as well as decade by decade and cohort by cohort. The papers in this volume, each in a different way, illustrates the great diversity of longitudinal research from historical sources. Some of the papers use sources being examined for the first time and methodologies still being developed. All of the papers, each in a different area, contribute to the frontiers of knowledge being generated for the first time. Like all pioneering work these papers will attract others; few of these authors will have the last word on their topics. The collective contribution of these papers to the development of the genre of longitudinal research from historical sources may turn out to be as important as the knowledge each of them generates on individual topics. Notes 1 The authors use the terms Indigenous, Aboriginal, Indian and First‐Nation interchangeably.