EXAMINING PATTERNS OF ITALIAN IMMIGRATION TO ...

3.0 Goals and Methods
Chapter III - Occupations
The aim of the following chapter is to learn more about the occupations that Italians
immigrants to Houghton County had and to verify if there is a relation between province of
origin in Italy and occupation.
Information about the jobs that Italians had in 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, and
1930 are from the censuses of the state of Michigan, Houghton County, of the same years. It
has not been possible to find anything about 1890 because the census was lost. Several
Polk’s Directories produced in those years also indicate the occupations of some people, but
they do not always match the information found in the censuses.
There are discrepancies in the terminology used by the agents working on collecting
the information for the state censuses. In fact a variety of agents worked in a range of
townships over several census years. Some of them are quite specific when describing
occupations. In some cases they have been as meticulous as to indicate job, place of job, and
level of job. In other cases they have been vague; for example they enumerate ‘laborer’, not
indicating what kind of laborer, or where the laborer worked. 35
The various levels of detail describing occupations are retained in the tables that
follow (Table IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, AND XIV). However, in order to compare the results of
this analysis with previously assumed ideas about the fields in which Italians were mostly
occupied, the occupations were grouped into eleven categories. The latter are large enough
to be workable and condense data, but fine enough to capture change. The categories are
Mining and related industries, Transportation, Boarding, Building, Farming, Food and drink
selling, Professionals and Skilled Tradesmen, General office jobs, General merchandise sale,
Unskilled, and Others.
The categories Mining and related, Farming, Construction, and Food and drink
selling have been included because previous studies indicated them as the field in which
35 This ‘flexibility’ in the use of terminology is particularly relevant when considering, for example, mining
jobs. In fact some of the census takers may have used the term ‘miner’ to indicate that a person was working in
the mines regardless his actual rank; that may have affected data.
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