Common Names

These were the most popular names for the last 120 households in the census.

Women:
Mary
Annie
Elizabeth
Margaret
Catherine


Men:
John
William
James
Thomas
Charles

Current activities

This week I visited the Mutter Museum and I enjoyed seeing the different displays. The display I liked most was the section that featured foreign objects that were swallowed by people. Some of the common objects were pins and pebbles. I wondered if any of the seventh ward residents had gone to the hospital because they swallowed a pin or pebble.

A few weeks ago, I saw the film documentary Strange Fruit, which was about Billy Holiday’s life and the history behind the song Strange Fruit. The song was about lynching and how the dead bodies swaying from the tree branch were like strange fruit. The images shown in the film were disturbing with vivid images of lynching.

On a lighter note, my current activities as the Public Outreach Coordinator have been planning the Du Bois Birthday Party on February 23^, 2007. One of the ideas is to have a Du Bois cutout for our guests to take pictures next to him. The place of the party is yet to be determined but there will be a photo cake of Du Bois.

Another upcoming activity is that I will visit the two partner high schools in mid-February. I am currently trying to find old photographs from the early 1900s of Philadelphia and Philadelphians. In addition, I thought of some ideas to get students interested in learning about the seventh ward. One activity titled “The day of the life of” will involve students by having them pick a person from the census and describe what that individual likes and does for fun.

Lastly, I went to the Van Pelt library and checked out the Anthology of Black Music. The music had different themes such as faith, blues and some children songs. I was familiar with one song, which was Pick a Bale of Cotton.

Du Bois on NPR

A freelance reporter who does work for NPR interviewed me two weeks ago. He came to talk about a report on the need for supermarkets in Philadelphia that I worked on several years ago. He looked me up before the interview and saw the reference to the Mapping Du Bois project. Of course, I couldn't help myself but talk about that as much as the supermarket study.

His piece ran on NPR's show "Day to Day" today. He framed the piece with the Du Bois map of the Old Seventh Ward. All and all, the piece was quite generous. I was really excited that he was able to work the Du Bois material in so well. You can hear the broadcast and see the write-up (including a piece of the original Du Bois map) on the NPR website:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7097476

Downtown Du Bois Mural Proposal Accepted

I quote from a letter I received from the Mural Arts Program:

"Congratulations! Your mural proposal for "Mapping the Du Bois Philadelphia Negro" project has been approved by the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. During this application cycle, we were fortunate to receive over 50 applications from community leaders and organizations to paint murals in neighborhoods throughout the city. Among them, we found your application among the most compelling. We are anticipating your project to start anytime within the next fiscal year of July 1, 2007-June 30, 2008."

Thoughts on the census

May part of the census is the last 120 households and I also would use Ancestry.com for getting the census data and also re-checking information. I As I greet these people from the seventh ward in my mind, I cannot help but imagine how they looked, talked, what they liked and disliked. I wonder if I would have been friends with some of the girls my age or what my occupation would have been in Philadelphia. I also wonder how married couples met and how women deal with the loss of their children.

Among the households, there are several women who gave birth to more children than the number of their children that are alive at the time of the census. One woman, I remember is Anna Kearney who lives on 2411 Lombard, she gave birth to 14 children and only seven children are alive. I can only imagine what sadness she feels loosing her children.

I wonder if the two men that are next-door neighbors walk to work together since they are both watchman. One man was from Germany and I wonder if the American let him know of his job when he moved in next door. A few houses down on 505 S. 27^th Street, there are three single women living together, one is a widow, and the other two women are sisters and are noted as single with no children. The widow gave birth to two children but only one child is living. This household makes me wonder how single women are viewed and the reasons why these two women are not married. My imagination runs wild and I think perhaps these women may have been jilted or perhaps they did not have a desire to marry.

Another curiosity finds me as I discover that on Tanney Street two men from Ireland came together to the U.S. and both share the same profession of nursing. These two men live as boarders in the same household. I wonder how long they have known each other and have been friends.

Later on as I make way down 505 Tanney Street, I find there are stepchildren in a household, two stepdaughters and a stepson in a family with two young children. This particular household catches my attention because I think this is the first family that is not nuclear. I wonder if the older daughter has to stay home to help her mother take care of her younger siblings. Another curiosity is where is her biological father? She did not have a job and I wonder if that family has the same dilemmas step families face today. The stepson was not in school and does not have a job. Did he help with the children too? The youngest stepdaughter who is 12 years old is in school. I wonder if the stepchildren get along with their two younger siblings and with their stepfather.

Visit to Historical Society of Pennsylvania

I made my first trip to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. What a nice place to conduct research. I looked at the annual reports of the College Settlement Association from the mid-18900s and early 1900s. It was the leaders of the Settlement Association who wanted a study of blacks living in the Old Seventh Ward, and Du Bois lived at the Settlement House for the first year he was in Philadelphia.

The Settlement records make a few brief references to Du Bois and his study, but they seem to have given it relatively little attention. Some of the material that I found particularly interesting included:
--A study on the dietary habits of people living in Philadelphia (and one other city). The author, who received a fellowship from the Settlement to conduct the research, complained about people buying inferior food at the nearby stores;
--Report of the kitchen and coffee house, which was a sort of soup kitchen. The Settlement House offered "penny lunches" to neighborhood children. Clearly, the ladies at the Settlement House made connections between nutrition and health and physical and moral well-being.
--Stories about individual children who came to the Settlement House and caused trouble (nothing that a good hug and some discipline couldn't fix, though).

I am hoping to work with HSP to raise money so we can digitize some of these records. The primary sources provide such rich descriptions and photographs of life in the Seventh Ward. I will also be reviewing the scrap books maintained by Susan Wharton that describe a lot of the activity at the Settlment House. Eventually, I hope this research will form the basis of a paper about the intersection of housing, health, and social service/social work, and research activities inthe late 1890s.

Murals and Other Updates

The lack of blog entries over the last two months should not be taken as a sign that all is quiet on the Du Bois front. Several of us have been hard at work on a number of things:

1. Anne Garcia, our public outreach coordinator, submitted our application yesterday to the Mural Arts Program for a mural of Du Bois at 6th and Rodman Streets. We had a successful community meeting two days before that, at Mother Bethel AME Church, with representatives from all four of the neighborhood associations in that area. They have all been supportive, as have been Mother Bethel, ODUNDE, the fire station (next to the mural wall) and the property owner. We have also contacted McCall Elementary and the leader of the after school program at Starr Playground about including the kids in the mural process. They, too, were encouraging. We will hear in January whether our application has been accepted.

2. Our quest for a mural of Du Bois on campus make front page news in Tuesday's Daily Pennsylvanian.

http://www.dailypennsylvanian.com/media/storage/paper882/news/2006/11/14/News/Up.Against.A.Wall-2457967.shtml?norewrite200611160844&sourcedomain=www.dailypennsylvanian.com I met with the university architect a week ago and he was suprisingly interested in our request. I am not too optimistic that this will ulimately be successful, but the effort is generating some good conversation about art at Penn.

3. I learned yesterday that we are receiving a grant from the on-campus Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars program's Research and Education fund to collect and analyze health data for the Du Bois study area and time period. The data will include vital stats (births & deaths), contagious disease, hospital admissions records, newspaper articles, and whatever else we can find. Thanks to Brandon and Eric for their good work this summer which helped secure this grant.

4. We are hard at work cleaning the 1900 census data we collected this summer. That process should be done in the spring.

5. Erika Service, a new member of our team, is working on a documentary of the project and Du Bois' study. Let us know if you have suggestions.

6. We'll be submitting grant proposals to do 3D GIS work and further research on black churches (with Dr. Stephanie Boddie who specializes in this area) in December.

7. We have a website www.mappingdubois.com but I have not provided much content yet, so it's just the front page (although it looks pretty spiffy, in my mind). We'll be migrating the blog to that website rather than staying on blogspot some time in the future.

Enough updates for now. Look for more in January.