Yankee Destinies: The Lives of Ordinary Nineteenth-Century Bostonians

This book reconstructs important milestones in the lives of 2,808 white, native–born men who resided in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1860 or 1870. Selected systematically from the census for those two years, these men represent two cross-sections of those viewed by contemporaries as “typical” Bostonians.

Using a broad array of sources — manuscript census returns; tax assessments; city directories; birth, marriage, and death records for more than twenty states; cemetery records; newspapers; and ...