A NON-INVASIVE APPROACH TO HISTORIC CEMETERY STUDIES IN MILWAUKEE AND GERMANY: WAS THE AMERICAN DREAM WORTH IT?

Abstract

This thesis tests a non-invasive approach using readily accessible historic cemetery data to examine 19th-century immigration to the United States, with a focus on the narrative of the American Dream. This narrative, which is embedded within modern American culture and history, is an inspiring tale of people, mainly immigrants, starting over in a new country and creating a better life for themselves and their posterity. What motivates immigration is the idea that anybody can achieve the American Dream. But is this true? Are immigrants necessarily going to have a better life in a new country? What do we know about the lives of those who stayed behind? This study interrogates the notion of the American Dream by critically examining the mass migration periods of the mid-19th century—with a primary focus on the so-called “48ers” who immigrated to the Milwaukee area from southwest Germany in 1848—to see whether it was genuinely advantageous for these individuals to immigrate using changes in average life span and life expectancy as a measure of quality of life. Online gravestone information is used to analyze the average life spans of people born two generations before, one generation during, and two generations after the arrival of the 48ers. The resulting data reveal outliers and trends in population dynamics of the living populations in the Milwaukee area and southwest Germany, painting a more differentiated picture of events overshadowed by the trope of the American Dream.