School of Humanities and Social Science Division of Social Science 225 Reconstructing Historical Lives from Demographic Data Supervisor: GIETEL-BASTEN Stuart Arthur / SOSC Student: AGARWAL Aryawardhan / SENG Course: UROP1000, Summer As a group, we were tasked to input data from Wilmington, Delaware in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s. This data was taken from scanned records using FamilySearch’s services, where we looked at births and deaths in the region. Since the records were physical copies, we were tasked to interpret the records, then inputting the data into an excel sheet to make for easier analysis. The purpose of this data was to be able to identify trends based on different variables, like race, sex, location, and more, in relation to the births/deaths. These trends could then be compared to norm for that time. For example, one area we could look at is infant mortality rate, based on sex, to see whether female or male babies tend to survive longer. Similarly, we could look at average of death between the sexes and then conclude reasoning behind it based on the era’s treatment of women compared to men. TASKS OVERVIEW Population figures, in many cases, can act as indicators of the living standards of people in a certain area and time. It reveals information and observations on the differences among various groups in a society: ethnicity, genders, occupations, and more. These differences, often being included in public policy discussion, can be effectively quantified, and observed in the analysis of such population statistics. In this project, we hope to place our focus on the past and to explore if there were important trends in records of birth and death that may inform the characteristics on potential inequalities faced by different population groups. Data on births and deaths in the late 19th century and early 20th century is being studied, with a dataset on these records in New Castle, Wilmington, Delaware, United States. It is worthy of notice that there were already several studies focusing on related topics on population for the United States, such as mortality, but many were estimation-based and without details such that further analysis at other aspects can be done. Reconstructing Historical Lives from Demographic Data Supervisor: GIETEL-BASTEN Stuart Arthur / SOSC Student: HO Chi Hong / COMP Course: UROP1000, Summer As a group, we were tasked to input data from Wilmington, Delaware in the late 1800s to early 1900s. This data was taken from scanned records using FamilySearch’s services, where we looked at births and deaths in the region. Since the records were physical copies, we were tasked to interpret the records, then inputting the data into an excel sheet to make for easier analysis. The purpose of this data was to be able to identify trends based on different variables, like race, sex, location, and more, in relation to the births/deaths. These trends could then be compared to the norm for that time. For example, one area we could look at is the infant mortality rate, based on sex, to see whether female or male babies tend to survive longer. Similarly, we could look at the average death between the sexes and then conclude the reasoning behind it based on the era’s treatment of women compared to men.
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