Irish Labor Demographics Research

 Irish Labor Demographics Research  

In my time with the Irish Railroad Workers Museum, apart from my docentry, I have worked primarily on demographics research.  At the museum, we are working to construct a new exhibit that will depict the changes in profession over the years among Irish immigrants in Baltimore.  Of particular interest, is the period beginning in the 1850s, when Irish immigration was at its peak, to the 1920s, the decade hosting the first World War.  We want just to examine the trends ranging from the Great Hunger to the Great War, but due to the nature of the census records we can only be as precise as the decade.  To record the professions of Irish immigrants we use the Enoch Pratt library’s access to HeritageQuest’s historical census data.  From here, I search by those born in Ireland, and who lived in Baltimore at the time of the census.   I narrow the search to those in ward 18, as this is where our museum is located, so I want additional data specifically for this district.  When I find an occupation listed in census, I then add it to the parameters and run the search again.  This allows me to cross-reference the occupations in ward 18 held by Irish folk with those in the entirety of the city.  This allows me to compile a comprehensive list of professions, while removing outliers that would not be relevant to the overall project, i.e. professions that only appear once in the entire census.  From here, I then repeat this process with the following decades.  There however was a significant issue with this tactic when I approached the decade of 1890.  As one may be aware, the census records for Baltimore in this decade were lost in a fire, and as such there is a significant gap in the data for this project.  In addition to this, the data for 1880 appears to be corrupted in some way, making the search results return out of order.  Though the data for this decade is still available, it will prove difficult to decipher.  Despite any setbacks, great progress been made for this project, and we are close to entering the design phase, where we will interpret the data and with this interpretation construct a new exhibit.

        

NMD Internship Research Continues

 

Davidge Hall on the UMD campus. This building was originally part of the College of Medicine of Maryland, which would become the UMD, and was named after Dr. Davidge who had the anatomical theater he built for teaching students in his home destroyed by an angry mob.

 

Recently, I’ve been continuing research for some of the more modern (relatively) colleges that I’ve been looking at. I’ve had to scour a lot of census data and some city directories, which I have found not quite as fun since hunting for one specific guy to see where exactly he lived throughout every resident of Baltimore is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack.

                But I’ve come across some very interesting sources so far, one of the founders of the University of Maryland had wrote and published a book in the 1830s about how the progress of establishing the school went, which was actually really interesting. One of the two men who founded the school actually had an angry mob break in and completely destroy a personal anatomical theater he had built to teach dissecting to students because they were so upset to hear about his dissections. This same school actually, in it’s very first few years, was located in an old wooden schoolhouse on Fayette St, and the building was so old and in such a state of disrepair that during the winter, professors and students would come in to find their specimens they’d been working on completely frozen and covered in a layer of ice.

                I think it’s been interesting learning all of this so far, and relatively enjoyable too. The main problem I come across is when I’m completely unable to pinpoint an exact location for a college. Streets names have changed over the years, for example we no longer have a ‘McClellan Alley’, and also despite being in session, and having students and faculty, sometimes schools would publish advertisements in the newspaper, in dental journals, in city directories that just wouldn’t have an address at all. They’d have a list of the entire faculty and all the specifics on what they taught but no address, which has been a bit annoying, but there are bound to be potholes in the road to knowledge.

Sinking My Teeth In to An Internship at the National Museum of Dentistry

Close up of a map of Baltimore from 1822. 44 is the Baltimore College, which existed from 1803-1830, on Mulberry St and Cathedral St.

 I am working as a curatorial research intern this spring at the Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry! My internship started at the end of January, where I met with my internship supervisor to talk about what the exhibition I would be working on was. This summer, the museum plans to open an exhibition, though I believe it’ll mainly be online, regarding the various dental schools and
universities in Baltimore and Maryland which all eventually became absorbed into the
University of Maryland system. The very first dental school in the entire world was
opened in Baltimore, and so I’m helping on researching each of these historical colleges
and writing profiles on how and when they were founded and by who, where the school
buildings were, basic information about graduates and matriculates, and how they
eventually became a part of the UMD!
I have nine different schools, universities, and private educators that I am
researching, that were established or working from the late eighteenth century up until
the end of the 1800s! This internship is researched focused, so I spend most of my time
working and digging around in digital archives and collections, and reading through
digitized books, journals, publications, letters, and newspapers from one hundred years
ago trying to find information which is relevant to the respective schools.
So far, some of the most interesting things I’ve come across in my research has
been reading through old publications of the American Journal of Dental Science, which
published monthly and covered basically any and all news in the world of professional
dentistry, and old maps of Baltimore from throughout the 1800s to try and hunt down
very specific (usually unlabeled) buildings that once housed dental schools. I’ve lived in
the Baltimore area my whole life, so it has actually been kind of fun to compare maps
from 1820 and 1850 to the modern city, and see how it’s grown and changed. It’s a bit
like being Nancy Drew but for dental colleges!