Americans and Return Migrants in the 1881 Scottish Census

Abstract

This article reveals basic demographic information on Americans and Scottish return migrant parents of the 1321 American children listed in the 1881 Scottish census and investigates reasons for return migration from America to Scotland. Census information was downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet and data including occupation, age, relation to head of household, place of residence and length of time back in Scotland, were counted and listed. General causes of return migration are explored and specific reasons for migrants, especially coal miners, to return to Scotland are briefly touched upon; covering the economic downturn in America during the mid-1870s and tensions towards immigrants in the United States during this period. The results of a deeper genealogical study of four families are reported. More than two-thirds of the parents of American children listed were Scottish with others primarily Irish and English. There was a wide range of occupations with construction and coal mining having the greatest numbers. Most families were living in Lanarkshire and Midlothian but 28 other Scottish counties were found as places of residence. Further research is needed to identify whether American children and their Scottish families are represented in other census years.

1. Introduction

This research began with a throw-away comment in a lecture during the early stages of my work towards a postgraduate degree in genealogical studies with the University of Strathclyde. The point was made that Americans (the term ‘Americans’ has been used throughout to indicate people born in the United States of America) comprised the largest non-UK/Irish cohort in the 1881 Scottish census—larger numbers than the French, Germans and so on and this caught my imagination.

As an American immigrant to the UK living in Scotland, I am curious about my fellow compatriots; why they were here, what their lives were like and if and how they affected their adopted country and I decided to focus on these Americans for the research aspect of my degree.

What does this type of enquiry have to do with genealogical practice? Well, part of genealogical research is being able to answer broader questions on what life was like for our ancestors and not just to know when and where they lived. This type of enquiry helps to put flesh on the bones of our family trees as it gives possible insights into motivations and the reality of day to day life. Undertaking an academic research inquiry also affects my professional practice by providing a broader understanding of the social and economic issues of the time but also by increasing my knowledge of the relevant datasets and skills in using them.

The paper which is based on a presentation at the 32nd International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences in August 2016 is structured as follows (McCabe 2016). First, I discuss stage one of the research which was a demographic survey of all Americans identified in the 1881 Scottish census, half of whom were found to be children under the age of fifteen. Secondly, I focus on stage two of the research which surveyed these children in an attempt to discover if their parents were Scottish return migrants and I provide a short discussion of major areas of concern in the study of return migration along with some thoughts on why these particular migrants may have chosen to return to Scotland.

2. Literature Review

Are there any great trends in history that can explain the numbers of Americans living in Scotland in 1881? After investigation of the period from 1870 to 1881, no one reason stood out for the presence of the adult Americans in Scotland. On the whole, the United States seems to have been the more promising country, with rising real wages and better living conditions even given its unequal society, labour unrest and resentment towards immigrants. There was widespread tension in the United States at this time period between workers and management around the issue of employing immigrants, who it was felt, led to lower wages and the reduction of the number of jobs for Americans (Tindall and Shi 1997, p. 618).

During the 1870s America was recovering from its Civil War, industrializing quickly and growing massively in population, mainly through immigration. Scotland had also been industrializing; after 1830, and especially in the last half of the 1800s, there was a tremendous increase in development in Scotland particularly in coal, iron, textiles, steel, shipbuilding and engineering. There was also a huge Scottish population rise and the period from 1830 to 1911 saw a doubling in population (Devine 2006, p. 252). This rise is incredible as it is estimated that just under one million Scots migrated to the United States between 1853 and 1914 (Anderson and Morse 1990, p. 16).

Some of the Americans in Scotland were probably coming to further trade between Scotland and the United States. In 1877, at a New York City Chamber of Commerce meeting, half of the U.S. Cabinet, including the President and the Secretary of State, extolled the virtues of expanding trade overseas (Lafeber 1963, p. 40). The first U.S. Consul to Scotland had been appointed on 14 July 1798 to Leith and the consular system gradually spread throughout Scotland. This would have begun the processing of emigrants to America and also supported Americans resident in Scotland (U.S. Consulate General in Scotland 2017).

Return Migration Issues

As around half of the Americans in the census proved to be children of Scottish return migrants, a review of the literature was carried out. There are five major areas of concern in the study of return migration identifiable through scholarly literature:

• The difficulty in discovering rates of return. This is largely due to the lack of documentation and, where there is documentation, the inclusion of return migrants with visitors, tourists and others;
• Defining return migration. Different definitions revolve around length of stay and the motives behind the migration;
• Why do people return? There are many reasons people have for returning to their country of origin. Those discussed in the literature include political and/or economic climate in home and/or host country, the saving of enough money for successful return, family ties, retirement, homesickness;
• What type of impact do returnees have on their country of origin? Most researchers find both positive and negative impacts in the home country. Some researchers claim that impact seems to be diluted due to low numbers of return migrants in any one area whereas others find important local impacts through the enrichment of the economy.
• Gaps in research. Researchers all agree that there are many gaps in the topic area of return migration and much more work needs to be done.

Unfortunately, until the last decade, most published works on British return migration did not touch on Scotland at all beyond a few statistics or sentences. The editor of a recently published book combining essays on different aspects of return migration to Scotland, Mario Varricchio (2012), provides a valuable review of the extant literature on return migration to Britain generally and Scotland more specifically. He highlights four essays on Scotland in a volume edited by Marjory Harper published in 2005; one of which, Alexia Grosjean’s article ‘Returning to Belhavie, 1593–1875: the impact of return migration on an Aberdeenshire parish’ is the only one to discuss nineteenth century migration (Grosjean 2005). She looks at the impact of resources brought back by emigrants from the Baltic region and Indian subcontinent through the endowment of churches and schools and funding of roads and poor relief.

Varricchio also discusses Harper’s book Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (2003) which includes an overall portrait of Scottish return migration and Angela McCarthy’s work from 2007 in which she focuses on various factors bringing people to return during the early twentieth century (McCarthy 2007). Overall he finds that, ‘only a few aspects of the complex historical reality of Scottish return migration have been described satisfactorily until now…it is simply too early for more than a sketchy description of this important phenomenon’ (Varricchio 2012, p. 18). His work, Back to Caledonia: Scottish Homecomings from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, expands the literature available through studies on return migration from France, Germany, India, Canada, Australia and to a small extent the United States, and provides a welcome focus on a range of time periods and types of return migrant.

Return migration has been defined as ‘people return[ing] to their country or region of origin after a significant period abroad or in another region’ (King 1986, p. 4). Distinctions are made between different types of return migration such as temporary migration, circular migration, and ancestral return migration or second generation return and the families in the 1881 census probably represent all of these types.

Temporary migration is used to describe individuals who migrated with the goal of making money that could be used in the ultimate return to the home country. This type of return migration was particularly prevalent among emigrants from southern and eastern Europe to the United States in the early twentieth century. Baines estimates that 30–40% of northern Portuguese, Croats, Serbs, Hungarians and Poles returned and 40–50% of Italians did so (Baines 1991, p. 39). He thinks that temporary migration did occur from Britain in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but that it was never as important as that from other areas of Europe (Baines 1985, pp. 137–38).

Circular migration involves the repetitious movement between areas dictated perhaps by the availability of certain types of work and is really a type of temporary migration. There are well-documented cases of circular migration in Scotland. Marjory Harper has recorded a well-established seasonal migration route by granite masons, quarrymen and general labourers between Northeast Scotland and America. She says, ‘during the 1870s and 1880s it was by no means unusual for around 200 granite tradesmen to be lured away from Aberdeen each spring to the American quarries and stoneyards’ (Harper 1988, p. 255). While there are 36 masons of various types among the fathers in the study, only three of them are living in Aberdeenshire and there are only three granite stone-dressers listed.

The American children born to non-American families could be described as ancestral return migrants. Ancestral return migration is defined by King as, ‘the return of people to a homeland that their ancestors came from but which they themselves were not born in. These include second generation children born in a host country who return with their parents’ (King 1986, p. 6). In a more recent publication, King and Christou have suggested the terms ‘counter-diasporic migration’ and ‘second-generation return’ to describe the phenomenon of second-generation ‘return’ to the country of their parents’ birth (King and Christou 2010). King and Christou in a slightly later paper (King and Christou 2011) describe a typology of returns particularly as they relate to second and subsequent generations. These include short-term return visits, return mobilities of childhood, second-generation return as adults and ancestral return. They also consider the link between return visits and longer-term relocation and the problems around the nature and location of return.

Many of the studies described above rely heavily on letters and diaries and are thus largely qualitative by design. This study is quantitative so is different from most of the literature found. Some of the major issues in return migration will be explored through the data gathered but concrete inferences from the statistical data will be avoided. I may speculate over an individual’s motivation for return migration but there is no way to know for certain why someone moved back to Scotland through such a limited source as the census returns.

However, as found in the literature, there are many reasons for people to return to the home of their birth. Among them are homesickness, family ties, an economic downturn and simply making enough money to return ‘home’. It is difficult to pinpoint why the families in this study returned to Scotland but probably all of these factors played a part. Thankfully, the experiences of return migration do seem to be largely universal as accounts from people returning home to various countries from a wide range of places have many similarities.

3. Materials and Methods

I began by downloading transcribed 1881 Scottish census information from the Ancestry website, used as it allows a search on censuses limited by place of birth, sex and relationship to head of household (Census 1881). Once an individual’s record is accessed, others in the household are available through links and are easily viewed. The birthplaces of the parents of an American child were ascertained, as were the birthplaces and dates of any other siblings. Sibling birthplace can give information on the amount of time the family was back in Scotland and any other places of residence both before and after the American child’s birth. Parent age and occupation were also noted. Batches of names were downloaded into a MS Word document table, unnecessary columns and images removed, data was cleaned to remove incorrect matches (non-US places of birth) and data was then exported into a MS Excel spreadsheet.

I chose to use MS Excel as the initial analysis was not complex and its sorting, filtering and charting functions were adequate to my needs for this one census year study. Future research developments will require a more robust relational database allowing for patterns and relationships across different datasets to be revealed.

Included in these results were many individuals listed as being born in America—Canada or S. America—beunos ayres (sic) and these along with any shown as born in America—S or S. America (which could be the southern states of the USA or South America), were removed to err on the side of caution. The initial search results gave a grand total of 2167 individuals born in America to work with. As each individual was viewed, his or her data was entered into the spreadsheet. Data collected included: Parent(s) American? (yes/no—American Father), (yes/no—American Mother); Father place of birth; Father date of birth; Father occupation; Mother place of birth; Mother date of birth; Mother occupation; Mother head of household?; Estimated time in Scotland (based on siblings born in Scotland birthdates). The filter tool gave the ability to sort individuals by various datasets.

One of the problems with using census data is that stepfamilies are not often identified as such, thus children showing two Scottish parents may in fact have had an American parent who died and a Scottish parent who has remarried. Some of the families with American children are clearly stepfamilies; identifiable by duplicate ages of children born in several countries. These families have had the ‘blood’ parent listed, when this person was identifiable, and the other parent ignored. There were not many of these families, perhaps 20 at most.

Five families representing different types of household and parent and child origin were then briefly researched in an attempt to discover their circumstances in America and in Scotland, both before and after the return to Scotland. Some of these families are also used to illustrate particular research findings. Their American children were checked for any return migration to the United States. This work was done by searching standard genealogical sources, which are detailed further in the case studies section of this report.

4. Results

4.1. Initial Research Aims and Results

My initial aims were to:

(1)

Gather basic demographic data on the 2167 Americans in the 1881 Scottish census to include:

• Age;
• Sex;
• Occupation;
• Birthplace in USA.

(2)

To consider why these people were bucking the overwhelming trend of migration to the United States and moving in the opposite direction—to Scotland.

4.1.1. Sex

There was a fairly even balance between the sexes with 1149 males (53%) and 1018 females (47%) listed. This population of migrants shows a slightly greater number of males than the Scottish population as a whole which in 1881 had 1,799,475 males (48%) and 1,936,098 females (52%) (Census Office Scotland 1882a, vol. I, p. xv). However, this balance of males to female migrants is broadly similar to other countries’ gender ratios which show, for the year 1880, female immigrants at 45% of the foreign born population (Alexander et al. 2008, p. 26).

4.1.2. U.S. State of Origin

A small number of the individuals had a state of origin listed in the census (543) so these results are only indicative. There were 32 states listed as places of birth and the bias towards area was very strong with New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the industrial heartland of the Midwest (Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania) making up all but one of the nine states with more than 10 originating individuals. Missouri was the sole exception. New York, with 199 people, had more than half as many more people originating from it as Pennsylvania, the next ranked state which had 78 individuals (Figure 1).

4.1.3. Age Range of Americans in 1881 Scottish Census

The age range of the individuals indicates that just over half of the Americans listed (1321) were children up to the age of fifteen. This percentage is fairly close to that of the Scottish population at the time with the 1881 census showing that 47% were less than 20 years of age (Census Office Scotland 1882b, vol. II, p. x). Individuals from 21 to 30 represent 10.3% (223) of the total; the 31–40 and 41–50 age ranges each have 129 people or 5.6%; 51–60 year olds represent 4.4% (95); 61–70 year olds represent 1.85% (40) and finally the 71–90 age range had 0.96% (21) of the total (Figure 2).

4.1.4. Occupations of Adult Americans in the 1881 Scottish Census

There was a very wide range of occupations listed and of the 846 people over the age of 16, 525 (or 62%) of them had an occupation stated. This number does not include 17 annuitants (people living off investments or other private means). Occupations have been listed broadly by category and more generic occupations such as ‘labourer’ kept together with any place of work given. Thus an ‘Iron labourer’ was listed under the Iron Industry instead of a more general ‘Labourer’ heading.

The two categories with the most individuals were servants with 86 people listed, giving a total of 16%. This is a higher percentage than the Scottish population as a whole where 11% were engaged in domestic offices or services. The textile, clothing and shoemaking category had 70 people listed, being 13% of the total number. This is a lower percentage than the Scottish population as a whole which had 19.5% involved in the textile and dress industries.

4.1.5. Discussion of Initial Research Results

The main finding of the initial research was that almost half of the Americans in the 1881 Scottish census were children between the ages of zero and fifteen and almost half of those were between five to ten years old. The next phase of the paper discusses these children and their parents.

Noteworthy Americans in the 1881 Scottish census include Caroline Soule, who in 1880 became the first woman to be ordained as a minister in the United Kingdom (in the Universalist Church) (Peart 2008); John MacArthur, the Provost of Inverary; and Bret Harte, an author who specialized in stories of the California gold rush of 1848 and who was the U.S. Consul to Glasgow from 1880 to 1885 (Encyclopedia Britannica 2014).

4.2. Expanded Research Aims and Results

Once the first round of results were completed, a deeper survey of the American born children aged 0–15 with the primary question being, ‘were they the children of returned Scottish migrants?’ was undertaken. Aims with this phase were to:

(1)

Gather basic demographic data on the parents in the 1881 Scottish census to include:

• Nationality;
• Scottish county of residence by number of American children;
• Occupation of parent;
• Number of years in Scotland since return.

(2)

To consider issues around return migration found in the literature.

While the 1195 Scottish parents found in this study can be identified as return migrants, there is no way of knowing how many other return migrants from America there were in Scotland. Before 1878 when incoming passenger lists began to be kept of people entering the United Kingdom from ports outside of Europe and the Mediterranean, it is difficult to identify where people were coming from and in what numbers. Anderson and Morse believe that around one third of those who left eventually returned to Scotland, however they do not give much evidence to support this (Anderson and Morse 1990, p. 16).

The U.S. government attempted to count both immigration and emigration from 1908 to 1923; the grand totals were 9,949,740 immigrants from all countries and 3,498,185 leaving, 88% of those returning were Europeans. The return rate among all nationalities was 35% for the period. Scottish specific numbers are 301,075 immigrating and 38,600 emigrating, giving a return rate of 13% (U.S. Secretary of Labor 1923) (Wyman 1993, pp. 9–11). These figures are from a later period than this study but may be indicative of overall trends of return migration.

4.2.1. Top 10 Scottish Counties of Residence

There were families with American children resident in 30 Scottish counties in the 1881 census. The areas with the greatest number of families were urban in nature; Dundee in Angus, Paisley and Greenock in Renfrewshire, Edinburgh and its suburbs in Midlothian and, with the highest concentration of all, Glasgow in Lanarkshire with 37% of the total (Figure 3). This agrees with general populations trends as Lanarkshire had the largest percentage of separate families of any area in Scotland in 1881 at 24% (Census Office Scotland 1882b, vol. II, p. xxviii).

These families were joining a great wave of Scots living and working in cities. J.M. Brock states, ‘By 1850, [Scotland] was the second most urbanised country in Europe, exceeded only by England and Wales’ (1999, p. 11). There were, of course, families found living in rural counties, such as Ross and Cromarty showing 10 American children in the census and Orkney having four.

4.2.2. Parents by Nationality

There was a total of 1570 parents of American children listed in the 1881 Scottish census (Figure 4). Of these, the dominant nationality was Scottish with 1195 individuals; there were 276 Irish, 63 English, 36 Americans, six Germans, six Polish, four Canadians and one each of Hungarian, Maltese, French, Australian and Welsh birth.

4.2.3. Number of American Children in Two-Parent Households Grouped by Parental Nationality

The dominant nationality of parents in both two-parent and one-parent household is Scottish. A total of 74% of children lived in Scottish two-parent households with the next highest percentage being 14% of children who had Irish parents. Children in single parent families had the same type of spread with 63% of the children living with Scottish mothers and 14% with Scottish fathers. There were five children found living in a two-parent household with an American mother and father, 28 in an American father-led single parent household and six in an American mother-led single parent household.

4.2.4. Probable Year of Migration to Scotland

This information was found by looking at the age of the youngest American child in a family and the age of any younger siblings born in Scotland. Barring any missing siblings due to child mortality, the family must have returned (or come) to Scotland between the births of the two children, thus giving the number of years the family had been resident. The largest peaks of migration to Scotland occurred between 1873 and 1881 with 305 families arriving in those years. However, not all of these parents will be Scottish return migrants as they include Irish, English and individuals of other nationality.

4.2.5. Number and Type of Occupations of Parents of American Children

There was a wide range of occupations listed and of the 1570 parents of American children, 638 of the fathers and 169 of the mothers had an occupation listed.

Among the mothers, the two categories with the most individuals were the textile and clothing industry with 61 people listed and servants and cleaners with 44 people listed. One of the case study families was headed by a textile worker, Mary M. Mechan, mother of Rose Mechan (born about 1874 in New York). Mary was a power loom weaver and a single mother born in Glasgow. The individual occupations with the highest numbers were housekeeper (20) and dressmaker (15) (Figure 5).

Among the fathers, the two categories with the most individuals were construction with 121 people listed and the coal industry with 89 people listed. The individual occupations with the highest numbers were coal miners (75), general labourers (35) and masons (27) (Figure 6).

As noted, the most prevalent occupation among the fathers was that of coal miner (75 individuals) with a further 14 involved in the coal industry. Colliery owners in Britain were using blacklists and lockouts during the 1800s in an effort to thwart both the creation and power of unions in the mines and rebellion against the use of ‘Yearly Bonds’. A Yearly Bond gave a bounty to miners who would bind themselves to an employer for a year and a day; it did not provide for the payment of wages when the pit was idle for fewer than three days at a time. Apparently, this clause was often abused in slack times when mines were briefly closed in the interest of economy; miners were not allowed to accept work at other mines during these times of closure and infringement of the terms left them liable for prosecution and imprisonment (Gottlieb 1978, pp. 360–61).

After the National Association of Coal, Lime and Ironstone Miners of Great Britain was formed in 1863, union leaders quickly began to sponsor emigration of miners as a way of reducing problems of excess labour. The coal industry in the United States had begun a long-term expansion after the Civil War and the early 1860s were also years of full employment in collieries in the United Kingdom. Scottish and English unions saw these factors as an opportunity to enhance their wage negotiating position through the control of coal output and a reduction in the size of the labour force by the encouragement of emigration. Union leaders cooperated with agents for American coal companies in their recruitment efforts and ‘it was not an unusual sight to see parties of as many as a hundred miners or more sailing down the Clyde’. It was reported in The Glasgow Sentinel that Scottish emigration societies assisted forty to fifty miners and their families to leave for America weekly (Gottlieb 1978, pp. 364–66).

Some of the families studied may have decided to return as the result of an economic downturn in America caused by the ‘Panic of 1873’, which set off a depression that lasted six years. The economic slowdown in the United States corresponded with a demand for iron in the early 1870s in the United Kingdom that brought coal miners’ wages far above normal levels (Gottlieb 1978, p. 357). The American panic was caused by the contraction of the money supply due to the U.S. Treasury’s post-Civil War withdrawal of dollars and the overexpansion of the railroads. During 1873, twenty-five railroads defaulted on their interest payments, causing a prominent investment firm to go bankrupt. The ensuing ‘stampede of selling’ forced the stock market to close for ten days. The depression was marked by widespread bankruptcies, unemployment and a drastic slowdown in railroad building (Tindall and Shi 1997, pp. 559–60).

These economic factors may very well have provided reasons for migrants to return in general and more specifically the 75 coal miners and their American children found in the 1881 census. One of the fathers in the case studies, James Fisher, was a coal miner; the American child of this family was born about 1875 and based on the birth of a younger son in Scotland, the family returned to Scotland by 1879. This family also shows signs of temporary or circular migration patterns as in the 1891 Scottish census there are a number of children born in both Scotland and America in various years. By the 1901 Scottish census, the American born child is living in Lanarkshire and has become a coal miner thus illustrating the continued importance of this industry to this family. Migrants may have also wanted to return due to widespread tension in the United States between workers and management around the issue of employing immigrants who, it was felt, led to lower wages and the reduction of the number of jobs for Americans (Tindall and Shi 1997, p. 618).

5. Conclusions

This research offers a clearer picture of the Americans and parents of American children in the 1881 Scottish census including demographic details and some information on their migration events, how long the families had been in Scotland and where in Scotland they were living. The initial research phase found that that almost half of the Americans in the 1881 Scottish census were children between the ages of zero and fifteen and almost half of those were between five to ten years old. The most important finding of the second research phase was that the parents of American children were overwhelmingly Scottish and thus return migrants, 1195 out of 1570 being of that nationality. The Irish had the next greatest number with 276 and American parents only accounted for 36 of the total.

Most of the families were living in urban areas with Lanarkshire and Midlothian having the greatest number. Scottish coal miners and their families may have been tempted to immigrate to America due to the encouragement of their unions and poor working conditions in Scottish mines. The economic downturn in America during the 1870s combined with relatively high wages in the United Kingdom could have contributed to their return. Other workers probably returned to escape the effects of the depression but factors such as homesickness and family pressures may have played their part as well.

Unlike the studies identified which look at ancestral return migrants (King 1986, p. 6) or counter-diasporic migrants (King and Christou 2010), this study provides a body of historic quantitative data instead of providing in-depth qualitative insights from letters or interviews. The data shows that the bulk of the children identified are under the age of 16 and thus would fall into the category of those whom King and Christou call ‘trailing travellers’ who presumably had minimal input into the family decision to return. Some of these children decided to either return to America later in life (along with the family group as with the Waterstons) or move to a new country, Australia (as with the Hay family). Research in other census years may clarify how many of these children experienced familial or individual re-migration and thus would help an overall understanding of the commonality of this type of migration.

The human experience described in the literature helps to illumine what may have motivated the Scottish parents of the American children to return to Scotland. However, determining how the parent cohort might fit into the various distinctions of types of return migration is difficult given the data available comes from only one census year. The case study families do illustrate possible cases of circular or temporary migration (the Fisher. Hay and Waterston families) and at any rate they show how nomadic some family units could be. For example, the Mechan family had an impressive level of mobility; the birth places of their children show that between 1865 and 1878 the family moved from Ireland to America, back to Ireland, then to the Isle of Man and finally to Wales.

More research is needed in other years of the Scottish census to identify whether or not Americans in those years are also predominantly children of return migrants and if not, their demographic profile. The issue of return migration among coal miners and familial circular migration is also of interest. Identifying Scottish/American trading partners would be helpful as growing development in trade between America and Scotland probably accounts for some individuals and a study of the role of U.S. consular offices in Scotland would be of interest as well. Some of these research points will be undertaken by the author as part of a PhD study studying Americans in Scotland resident during the nineteenth century.