Proximity of Parents to Their Adult Children in the United States in 1880: Evidence from Family Trees

Caglar Koylu, University of Iowa
Alice B. Kasakoff, University of South Carolina

We study the proximity of adult children and their parents, contrasting four relationships: father-son, mother-daughter, father-daughter and mother-son. Ravenstein, basing his evidence on the British 1881 census, thought that women did not move as far as men. If so, mothers and daughters would have resided closer to each other than fathers and sons. But his data was from a densely populated setting with a sizeable proportion of the population living in cities and towns. By contrast, data for our study comes from the United States in 1880, a settler society, where, particularly in the West, densities were low and people had travelled far from their birthplaces, a situation when we might expect even greater gender differences in distances moved. We study this on the county level, asking what proportion of each relationship type were residing in the same county in 1880. Because the information comes from family trees, we are able to describe how far married daughters lived from their mothers, which is difficult to study from other sources. By this time interstate migration had slowed in the East, so relatives of all types should have resided closer together there than in the West. We then move to the micro level, using a subsample of individuals from the trees linked to the 1880 census. This enables the calculation of "as-the-crow-flies" distances between pairs of relatives, determining whether they live in the same household. Additionally, the provided sample will be utilized to evaluate the accuracy of residential information within the family tree data and its representativeness.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 105. Kinship Dynamics and Effects: Historical Insights