A change in approach to the information was required as I could not find statistical information that was needed in order to answer my initial questions. I have switched up where I am going with this project – as I am now looking at some basic census data – Looking at Florida from 1880 (baseline year) through to 1940 (start of World War II) – where did people who lived in Florida born? Obviously, most were born in Florida but a large percentage came from elsewhere – mainly northern states at first. There are some small nuances, however, like the increase in Black Bahamians, their arrival was due mainly to jobs available during the “Miami Craze” from 1905 to 1925 as there were many jobs available literally building the city of Miami. Another nuance is the slow growth of a Hispanic population. Hispanic groups did not come to Miami in large numbers until after 1960.
So, the new questions here would be where did people who populated Florida come from in the first half of the 20th-century? What encouraged northerners to leave cooler northern states and settle in a much warmer climate? Why was the vast majority of migrants that came to Florida from the ‘Deep South’ (former Confederate states)? Why did so few people from the western states migrate to Florida. Why was there a large decrease in the number of African-Americans from the ‘Deep South’ between 1910 and 1920? The answers are in the numbers as long as the narrative of U.S. history is placed on top of them.
The process I used to collect this material was to utilize the information located on a website created out of the University of Washington that used information from the U.S. Census to identify where people who lived in each state at the time of the Census was born. The specific site I used was: https://depts.washington.edu/moving1/Florida.shtml
