Hey Eric. Names, addresses, employment data all came from 1950 city directories. They are available back to 1875 for Charlotte, not sure how far back they go for New Hanover. There may be some methods of cross-referencing them for an enterprising researcher. There could also be other data available about people's movement and where they went, though I'm not aware of it.
One tactic you could use to see if there was a surge in movement would be to look at the Star of Zion on Microfilm. SoZ was the paper for the AME Zion Church and covered Black life in Charlotte rather well for the era. It's the best option we have since the C. Post archives weren't saved.
I love how you got the names, occupations and addresses, Greg! Any chance the resident lists you studied go back to 1900 or so? I'm curious if there was a surge of refugees from Wilmington's Brooklyn in 1898. Tom Hanchett wrote that is about the time Logtown began to be called "Brooklyn" and I'm curious for the reasons. Any insight?
One tactic you could use to see if there was a surge in movement would be to look at the Star of Zion on Microfilm. SoZ was the paper for the AME Zion Church and covered Black life in Charlotte rather well for the era. It's the best option we have since the C. Post archives weren't saved.
That's a good thought. I spent a day with that microfilm at UNC-CH a couple of years ago. It was fascinating to see, but my eyes were sooo tired at the end of it.
It's been OCR'd, so it's keyword searchable. But because of the poor quality of the original film, the OCR is pretty bad too. Hopefully one day technology will fix that (probably sooner than we think with AI image recognition advancements, tbh).
Hey Eric. Names, addresses, employment data all came from 1950 city directories. They are available back to 1875 for Charlotte, not sure how far back they go for New Hanover. There may be some methods of cross-referencing them for an enterprising researcher. There could also be other data available about people's movement and where they went, though I'm not aware of it.
Here's a link for the Charlotte directories:
https://sites.google.com/site/onlinedirectorysite/Home/united-states-online-historical-directories/north-carolina-online-historical-directories/mecklenburg-county-north-carolina-online-historical-directories?authuser=0
One tactic you could use to see if there was a surge in movement would be to look at the Star of Zion on Microfilm. SoZ was the paper for the AME Zion Church and covered Black life in Charlotte rather well for the era. It's the best option we have since the C. Post archives weren't saved.
I love how you got the names, occupations and addresses, Greg! Any chance the resident lists you studied go back to 1900 or so? I'm curious if there was a surge of refugees from Wilmington's Brooklyn in 1898. Tom Hanchett wrote that is about the time Logtown began to be called "Brooklyn" and I'm curious for the reasons. Any insight?
One tactic you could use to see if there was a surge in movement would be to look at the Star of Zion on Microfilm. SoZ was the paper for the AME Zion Church and covered Black life in Charlotte rather well for the era. It's the best option we have since the C. Post archives weren't saved.
That's a good thought. I spent a day with that microfilm at UNC-CH a couple of years ago. It was fascinating to see, but my eyes were sooo tired at the end of it.
Yeah. The microfilm is really pretty poor quality, but I don't think there's any fixing that problem now. It's at least digitized and available on Digital NC (should have thought of that originally). https://newspapers.digitalnc.org/search/pages/results/?ortext=&andtext=&phrasetext=&proxtext=&proxdistance=5&rows=20&searchType=advanced&dateFilterType=yearRange&county=&date1=&date2=&lccn=sf88092969
It's been OCR'd, so it's keyword searchable. But because of the poor quality of the original film, the OCR is pretty bad too. Hopefully one day technology will fix that (probably sooner than we think with AI image recognition advancements, tbh).