Mapping Mobility: Spatial and Class Change in the Gilded Age Wall Street Workforce

The Database

Included in the Brown Brothers collection are four volumes of salary records. I assembled a database of salary records to track how compensation at the firm changed over time. Meanwhile, I also began tracking down employees at the firm in the 1900 and 1910 Census and, with the help of research assistants, created an additional database of demographic data mimicking my IPUMS database.
 
All told, there were some 270 workers at the Brown Brothers firm from 1890 through 1910. As of January 1900, there were 60 workers at Brown Brothers; in 1910, the firm had 106 workers, including 32 people who were also at the firm in 1900, making a total of 134 individual employees. In the first version of this project I only tracked Census records for workers during the time that they worked at Brown Bros.—in other words, if a worker was at the firm in 1900 but not in 1910, I retrieved the Census record for 1900 while ignoring the 1910 record. Peer feedback led me to expand my data collection to track workers who were at Brown Bros. in either 1900 or 1910 and then to find them in both Censuses. This yielded 168 records for 114 employees, out of a potential 268 records (134 individuals × 2 Census observations), or a 63% retrieval ratio. I then used a variety of sources to map the addresses found in the Census records to specific locations; for this stage in the project I used online geocoding services (most helpful for Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, where there have been the fewest changes in street and house numbering), online reproductions of historic maps, and contemporary directories—which often included block numbering guides—to find data.

The mapped data illustrate the dispersal of white-collar workers throughout the metropolitan area. By 1900, Brown Brothers employees already lived in a dozen different jurisdictions, and could be found in at least twenty by 1910. The site can be navigated by panning the map and clicking on dots to display additional information. A brief demographic summary is provided as a pop-up; clicking the indicated link will take the visitor to a page that includes a short narrative biography of the employee based on the Census data and in some cases insurance maps that display their home(s) and other primary sources about their lives. 

Mapping the data enabled me to observe patterns in workers’ moves between the two Censuses and to draw some conclusions about the lives of women workers I had not been able to glean from my previous research. Of the 54 people found in both samples—44 men and 10 women—the data show that 4 of the women (40%) were in the same home in 1900 and 1910. The mapping of the geographic data suggests that preexisting family ties were the most important factor in women’s decisions to move. Of the 54 people found in both samples—44 men and 10 women—the data show that 4 of the women (40%) were in the same home in 1900 and 1910, while a fifth moved only a short distance within Brooklyn. All five were living with one or both parents or an older relative.

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