Ah, the best use of an unemployed college graduate and a spare room. I hired my cousin to do some data entry on the 1900 census and she has just completed enumeration district 64, which is the northern part of the TC. Enumeration District 64 (ED64)goes from the 1400 block (odd #) of NJ to the 1700 block, Florida and Rhode Island Aves, 1st St, to Q and O Streets. I immediately tossed the Excel worksheet into an Access database and created a query about working women. Now I’m still getting used to the updated MS Access program and can’t seem to figure out how to exclude women “at school”. Women over the age of 15, 595 of them had some occupation. Of those 595 women, 473 were black. In 1900 the TC north African American women were laundresses, nurses (child and sick), house servants, and cooks. White working women were saleswomen, teachers, house keepers, landladies, office workers, and seamstresses.
Disclaimer-
To clarify, my census project is sponsored personally by me. I get moral and other minimal support from my employer, as it sort of falls under professional development. Secondly, this is NOT a building or house history project. Things like houses are secondary, people are more interesting. I have no intention of putting the raw data on-line. For one, it’s too much. ED 64 is over 2,500 names alone, and there are 3 other EDs to go. I do hope to go on to census years 1910-1930. However the rate we’re going I’ll probably get through to 1910 or 1920.
That's awesome. I was just looking through the 1880 census information (the actual responses, not the aggregate data) for LeDroit Park. It's surprising how many people had large households.
Well there were bigger families then and multi-generations in one household. Single adult men and women would live with relatives so there were a lot a family around. Not like today where the ideal is making sure your 20yr old son is not living in your basement and grandma is in the old folks home.
Really interesting stuff! I'm in that area, and while doing some demo work in my house, I uncovered the original brick walls and realized that my house used to be two completely separate houses (explains the 5 exterior doors I suppose). It always made me wonder about the demographics in that period, because they would have been tiny houses by themselves. Who would have lived there? How many people? What did they do?