1870 Flint Michigan Population Pyramid

For the last week I have been working on a population pyramid for the 1870 US Federal Census in Flint Michigan. This "neighborhood snapshot" allowed me to view the Myerhoff family within the context of their neighbors. For example, the Myerhoffs were both immigrants from Germany. Did they have a lot of immigrant neighbors? And if so, were they German? Was this a German enclave or was the family relatively alone? Well, as the pie chart below suggests, most of the Myerhoff's neighbors were born in the United States. However there was a significant immigration population.

Of those foreign neighbors, most were from Canada and Ireland, with only a small contingent of German immigrants. I was interested as to why the family lived away from a German neighborhood and I may have a partial answer. The median real estate amount in that neighborhood was $2,505.88 and the median personal property amount was $654.35. The census taker didn't attribute any real or personal property of value to the Myerhoff family. It seems the census taker didn't list any property under the value of $500, so this means that either the family was poor or they had so little the census taker didn't think it was worthy of notice. My theory is that the family was living in a low income neighborhood because it was what they could afford.

This brings me to the population pyramid. This census was taken 9 years after the beginning of the American Civil War and 5 years after its cessation. Therefore, I expected a dip in men between the ages of 30-49, the age range of males involved in the battle. However, I found that only the 35-39 age range had suffered losses in proportion to women of the same age. This greatly surprised me, but I feel I can account for the difference by noting the percentage of foreign men. As noted above, foreigners accounted for 37% of the neighborhood. I believe that men in their 20's and 30's fought in the Civil War and were lost, but immigrants moved into the neighborhood and account for the equalization of the male population and also account for the high number of females in the 35-39 age range.