In this research project theme we will be examining the patterns of movement of African American peoples before, during and after the Exoduster period in the late 1870's.

This type of research is generally called historical research. Historical research is the fascinating study of peoples and events of the past and the uncovering of the stories that had their influence on how things are today. Historical research does not have to be about the famous. The events in the lives of common and unknown people are often the most fascinating.

The data for examining this extraordinary movement of people lies in dusty records in hundreds of historical museums across the United States. Many of the most useful records related to this immigration are census records. Often the census records from that era are handwritten and not commonly seen by most museum visitors. Following the link you can see a typical sheet from the census record of the late 1800's.

Historic census records (link above) often contain information such as names, date of birth, place of birth, occupation, race, sex, last state of residence or the location from which immigrants moved. They also may contain agricultural records with many fascinating pieces of information about the residence. For example records may include types of livestock owned or even details such as the number of livestock killed by wolves. These historic census records provide much valuable data from which students can investigate a variety of historical research questions. In this project a minimal collection of census data should include the following data:

• State of Records
• County of Records
• Census date
• Name
• Age
• Sex
• Race
• Occupation
• State of Birth
• State Immigrated From

In this project students will need to compare information from at least two census years. Those years are the census dates on either sides of the 1879 Exoduster immigration. This might be the federal census conducted in 1870 and 1880 or a local agricultural census such as occurred in Kansas. In Kansas agricultural census data was collected in 1875 and again in 1885. By collecting census records before and after the Exoduster immigration students can compare the movement of African Americans during this critical period of time.

You can find records like these by asking your local historical museum. Consult the local telephone book, your local library, historical societies or your state government. Sometimes state historical societies or government agencies will have digitized the census data. Finding the ata on disk, or CD is possible but not likely. More likely than not it will be in paper form or on microfilm or microfiche. This will mean that it will take some long hours of browsing through these records. A real service for your community could be undertaken by students by typing these records into a database or spreadsheet. Students and teachers can work out with the local authorities the methods for doing this. Possible methods would be: