A Three Generation Perspective on Family Proximity: the US North in the 19th Century

Caglar Koylu, University of Iowa
Alice Bee Kasakoff, University of South Carolina

The third generation is critical in creating a cluster of kin and determining how many relatives live near each other. But studies of the residential dispersion of cousins are rare. Many studies of kin dispersion look at specific relationships, whether this be parents and children, or grandparents and grandchildren and they describe the distances between their residences as they evolve during the life cycle. Others have developed proxy measures of propinquity looking for the same surname among a block of census households nearby to measure kin clustering. This paper uses data from family trees to reconstruct families descended for two more generations from particular couples. It contrasts an early cohort , descendants of couples born in the US between 1785 and 1796 whose grandchildren were born between 1846 and 1889, with a later one descended from grandparents born 1835 to 1846 and whose grandchildren were born between 1895 and 1925. Using the states where people were born, we describe the process of dispersion over three generations. We expected to find that the degree of concentration would be higher in the longer settled areas than near the frontier and, since the settled area grew over time, that the area with more highly concentrated networks would increase over time. We do see this in the data, but surprisingly, the greatest concentration of kin occurred in the states most recently settled by Europeans: if a grandparent was born there there was a very high chance their descendants would remain.

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 Presented in Session 179. Kinship, Family, and Ideational Change in Historical Context