I introduced the GRIVA organization in the last note and said that they have a newsletter. It would have been appropriate to have given the name of the newsletter which is " GRIVA News & Notes ".
We saw that the US population was less than four million people in 1790. In the next eighty years, how much do you think the country grew (measured by population)? The answer amazed me, as it was about eleven times (i.e., to forty million)! Such growth rates do not come exclusively by internal additions, but require a tremendous influx of people. Quite a few of these additions were people from Germany. In the 130 years since 1870, we have grown by a factor of less than six (the 2001 population estimate was just shy of 285 million).
GRIVA has a library in conjunction with the LDS Family History Center at 5600 Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA. GRIVA recently acquired, as a donation, 173 books which include the works of Ruth and Sam Sparacio (the Antient Press), and of John Frederick Dorman.
One GRIVA publication is " Virginians and California Gold, 1850 ". This lists a total of more then 3,400 people in the 1850 census of the California gold area who said they were from Virginia. GRIVA maintains a website at www.griva.org .
In 1870, there were 37 states, nine territories, and the District of Columbia. There were about 62,000 churches. The denomination with the most churches was the Methodist faith (21,337), and it was followed by the Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Christian (Campbellites), Lutherans (2,776), and others. In the decade ending in 1870, the fastest growing denomination was the Latter Day Saints, followed by the Jewish faith and the Catholics. The Friends and the Universalists actually lost members in the decade.
Among the mens' occupations in 1870, there were 2,500,000 farm laborers and 3,000,000 farmers. Since the population was about 40 million, about one-quarter of these would constitute the working men. Thus, more than one-half of the working males were engaged in agricultural pursuits. As a sign of the times, there were 141 thousand blacksmiths, 161 thousand shoemakers, and 152 thousand miners. Only a few more than one thousand undertakers were required. The women were beginning, but just barely, to make inroads in the professions. In 1870, women's occupations included 67 clergy, 5 lawyers, 525 physicians and surgeons, and 33 gunsmiths (to select a few occupations).
(20 May 04)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.