Where the Boys (and the Girls) Are

I wrote a year ago about a map showing the distribution of men and women in America in 1890. Compare that map (taken from the David Rumsey Collection) to Richard Florida's Singles Map of the United States, based on 2006 Census Bureau data. Overlaying one map with the other (as I've clumsily done below) shows that things haven't changed much in 116 years. Men still predominate in the West; women still outnumber men in the East. And I still can't get a date.

An Unconventional Naming Convention

It has been established that Marilyn vos Savant is not a genealogist. But I think she has an interesting idea here:

I believe both men and women should keep their premarital surnames throughout life. When they get married and have children, sons would take their father’s surname, and daughters would take their mother’s surname. The benefit to girls and women would be enormous while costing boys and men nothing—except the fun of claiming ownership of the opposite sex! [Link]

I don't know anything about "claiming ownership of the opposite sex" (I only rent). But I wouldn't mind trying genealogy in a society where surnames were traditionally, consistently inherited in this way.

If the practice were longstanding, there presumably would be some surnames exclusively male, and others exclusively female. You would have patronyms (Johnson) and matronyms (Janesdaughter). Depending on how their ancestors divided their labor, surnames derived from occupations might differ: Smith and Nurse might be male and female respectively. A woman who bore a son after a one-night stand might have to decide whether to give the boy her own, female surname. "What was your mother's maiden name?" would be a lousy security question for women. One-name studies would split families apart.

Census records could get convoluted if a husband and wife had children by multiple spouses (sons of former husbands, daughters of former wives, each carrying the surname of an absent parent); but convolution can be good if it offers evidence of prior relationships. I don't think the naming convention vos Savant advocates would cause more problems for genealogists, just different ones. At least there would be far fewer women in my database with the last name "______."

Ass Density and Excessive Females

Among the additions made to the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection this weekend were Henry Gannett's statistical atlases for the 1890 and 1900 censuses. The maps show everything from the population densities of Presbyterians and Scandinavians to death rates due to consumption and typhoid fever. Presented on Plate No. 149 of the 1900 atlas is the "Number of Horses, Mules, and Asses per Square Mile."

Below is a detail from a map showing the "Predominating Sex" in 1890. Though most of the population schedules from that census have been lost, we can see that the East Coast was at that time overrun with females.