Most genealogy researchers are very familiar with the
journals of genealogy societies: local, regional and national. An example of a local
society journal is the ChicagoGenealogist,
a publication of the Chicago Genealogical Society. The Western New York Genealogical SocietyJournal, published
by said society ,
covers eight counties. A national organization, such as the NationalGenealogical Society, will have a national journal -- the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.
Many genealogical journals, including the ones above, are
classified as academic or scholarly journals. When a writer submits an article to an academic journal, he or she can expect
to have the piece peer-reviewed. Because of the rigorous standards that writers in academic journals must adhere to, the quality of the research is very high.
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Hartwell Hall, east side, DanielPenfield,
31 May
2010, Wikimedia.
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First, the scholarly article begins with an Abstract or summary of the research question: What is the reason for this study? What are the topics/questions being investigated?
Second, comes the Introduction:“What is already
known about this topic and what is left to discover?”
Third, is the Literature Review: “The review of
literature is meant to discuss previous work on the topic, point out what
questions remain, and relate the research presented in the rest of the article
to the existing literature.”
The fourth part of a journal article is the Methods and Data: What did the author
find and how did he/she find it?
The fifth section is Analysis and Results: What analytic techniques does the author use
to tease out information from the data? How does the author interpret the
findings?
The final step in the
reporting on research is the Discussion
and Conclusion: How do the findings connect
with other data? What other questions can be asked based on the new
information? Has this research added any new knowledge to this topic that would
be valuable to others?
Many genealogical societies publish scholarly journals that
contain information very helpful to family researchers. But academic journals
in a variety of disciplines often contain articles of great interest to
genealogists.
Where might one look to find these publications? Scholarly journals have long resided in college and other libraries. But in this age of the internet, digital copies are now available for many journals.
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in the stacks, Anna Creech, April 14,
2005,
Creative Commons, flickr.com
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Where might one look to find these publications? Scholarly journals have long resided in college and other libraries. But in this age of the internet, digital copies are now available for many journals.
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| Used by permission JSTOR |
To get an idea of the breadth of the journal offerings at
JSTOR:
Go to the webpage and follow these steps:
In the upper right of the screen (next to JSTOR logo), click
“About.”
On the menu bar at the top of the screen, hold the mouse on
“For Publishers” to access a drop-down menu.
Click on “JSTOR Publishers & Content Providers.”
This gives you an A-Z list of the more than 900 content
providers whose journals are in the database. You can also find journals arranged by content area: Browse by Subject.
I did a quick search and found
these intriguing organizations sure to get a genealogist’s interest up:
Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society
Economic History Society
Georgia Historical Society
Presbyterian Historical Society
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University of
Arizona Vertical Logo,
https://brand.arizona.edu/guide/identity,
19 September 2014,
Wikimedia.
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How about for un-affiliated individuals? JSTOR has two ways
you can gain access: JPASS (costs and has some limits) and Register and Read (free but has limits.) JSTOR is also offering free access (some limits) to journals
“published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere”
through a program called Early Journal Content.
Well, now that we know how to access journals at JSTOR and
what kinds of journals we can expect to find, let’s look at the results of a
search. One of my family lines is Irish, and they lived in Chicago from the
1850s. I want to learn as much about the lives of these people in the mid to
late nineteenth century as I can. In JSTOR, I did a search on “Irish Chicago” and got
over 2500 hits.
But on page 5, I found this listing:
Neighborhood
Effects on the School Attendance of Irish Immigrants' Sons in Boston and
Chicago in 1860 David
W. Galenson American Journal of Education, Vol. 105, No. 3 (May, 1997), pp.
261-293.
It is important to remember that although this article was not written for genealogists, it has great significance for anyone interested in American history: life in large cities in the nineteenth
century with an emphasis on the lives of immigrants.
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The ghetto, Chicago, Ill., Bird's-eye view of street scene, c1920,
LC-USZ62-80739, Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division Washington,
D.C. 20540 USA.
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“In recent years social scientists have become increasingly
interested in the question of how members of ethnic and racial minorities are
injured economically by living in segregated neighborhoods. A central concern
has been that the poverty of these neighborhoods may be self-perpetuating.” p. 261.
As Dr. Galenson noted, this concern with the adverse effects
of poverty on immigrant children is not new:
“It was often expressed in the nineteenth century, with a
particular focus on the problem of immigrant children who failed to attend
school.” p. 261-262.
The purpose of this study was to “investigate the concern of
(George Emerson, prominent Boston educator) and others in the nineteenth century
that the children of immigrants who lived in ethnic ghettos were less likely to
attend school than their peers who lived elsewhere.” p. 262.
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| 1860 Census Questionnaire, 1860 Image Gallery, US Census Bureau website. |
Of great interest to genealogical researchers is the source Dr. Galenson used for his study: the 1860 Federal Census for Boston, MA and Chicago, IL. He looked at each of the wards in both Boston and Chicago and compared them by wealth and ethnicity – with a focus on Irish heads of household.
Many of us have perused census documents, but it is unlikely
that we have done anything like what Dr. Galenson did with the data. Among the information the 1860 Census asked
for were the ages of the children living in the household and if they had
attended school at any time during the last year, what ethnicity the people in
the household were and if the family income was over or under $1,000 for the period.
Correlating this data for the different wards in Boston and
Chicago allowed Dr. Galenson to see the effects of the wealth of a household,
and if the household were Irish, on the chances of the children attending
school. And what he discovered was startling:
“…in Boston the probability of school attendance was
positively related to a ward’s wealth and negatively related to its proportion
of Irish residents, but in Chicago the reverse was true.” p. 270-271.
In other words, if you were a poor, Irish male child in Chicago
in 1860, you had a better chance of attending school than a child of similar
wealth and ethnicity in Boston.
The rest of Galenson’s study attempted to explain why this
difference existed. He found that there was no Catholic School System in Boston, so the public schools in Boston were pretty much
the only game in town – “…more than 85 percent of all children who attended
school in Boston in 1855 and 1860 went to public schools.” p. 271 In other words, the public schools had a monopoly on the market. Unless
you were wealthy, your children had only one choice – the public school.
In Chicago, on the other hand, the public schools had
competition from the Catholic Church. In fact, in 1860 nearly 36% of Chicago
children attended private school (mainly Catholic.) p. 275
Why would it make such a difference on school attendance if
a child had the choice to attend a public or a Catholic school? Galenson found the answer in a condition that differed in each city. Boston had a public
system that went back to 1635 while Chicago’s “…basis for a city school system
was first established by an act of the Illinois legislature in 1837….” p.
283. Along with the much longer history of its public education system, Boston
had more nativist sentiment among the administrators who ran the schools and the teachers who
interacted with the students.
Chicago
was different:
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American
citizens! We appeal to you in all calmness. Is it not time to pause? . . .
A
paper entitled the American patriot, Boston : Published by
J.E. Farwell &
Co., 1852, LC-DIG-ppmsca-07575,
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
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“In contrast to Boston, Chicago’s early public school system
may have also had a different attitude toward immigrants. Chicago’s population
was very heterogeneous from its earliest days, as the foreign-born made up 30
percent of its population in 1843 and more than 50 percent in 1850.” p. 284.
So what conclusion did Dr. Galenson make as to why Irish
boys in 1860 Chicago attended school in greater numbers than their cohorts in
Boston?
Irish children in 1860 Chicago had the choice of attending a Catholic School where their ethnicity, social class and religion were respected. On the other hand, Irish school-age boys in 1860 Boston had only one choice of school -- the public school, where they encountered discrimination due to their poverty, their Irishness, and their Catholicism.
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