Beauvoir Veteran Project\nData<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over a three-year period, researchers at the University\nof Southern Mississippi studied the Jefferson Davis Soldiers\u2019 Home in an effort\nto understand the experiences of the 1,845 men and women who lived there from\n1903 through 1957. The team created a random representative ten-percent sample\nfrom a list of residents, and located more information about them in the\noriginal home Register. This included their date of admission, name, age,\ncounty of residence, and the military unit in which the veteran or the widow\u2019s\nhusband served. Death or discharge dates are usually included as well, and\nsometimes notations about residents\u2019 re-entry, burial location, and family\ncontact information are added. Researchers used this information to dig more\ndeeply into each sample resident\u2019s history through digitized census, military\nservice, pension, and newspaper records. These sources offered insights into\nveterans\u2019 and their families\u2019 prewar and postwar wealth, slave holding status,\neducational levels, literacy rates, property ownership, wartime injuries,\ninfant and adult mortality rates, and early-twentieth century financial\nstability. Supplementing all of this were surviving Beauvoir board meeting\nminutes and biennial reports, along with some hospital and supply ledgers,\nlimited superintendent correspondence with residents and their families, and a\nfew personal accounts from inmates, as they were known at the time.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the key findings from this project include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

• Most\nwhite residents of Beauvoir enjoyed significant financial stability in their\nyouths and into the twentieth century<\/li>
• The\nmajority of residents lived in upper-class households in 1860<\/li>
• The\naverage age of Beauvoir residents in 1860, when President Abraham Lincoln was\nelected and the first southern state seceded from the Union, was 16 years old.<\/li>
• White\nprosperity faded significantly after the war, but the majority of Beauvoir\nresidents still enjoyed middle-class status in their communities.[1]<\/a> <\/li>
• Residents\nmay have been \u201cthe poorest of the poor,\u201d as historians have described them,\nwhen they arrived<\/em> at Beauvoir, but\nthat misleading phrase ignores the benefits of wealth that many residents\nenjoyed as children and adults. <\/li>
• The\nvast majority of residents described themselves as literate, and more than\nfifty percent had attended school. <\/li>
• Home\nownership records were only available for half of the sample, but among those\nresidents, two-thirds owned their owned homes in 1900 and 1910, indicating,\nalong with the other data, that many of Beauvoir\u2019s residents enjoyed financial\nsecurity through most of their lives.[2]<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n

  Beauvoir Veteran Project Complete Data File<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

  List of Male <\/a>and Female <\/a>Residents at Beauvoir, 1903-1957
  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  \n\n\n\n

  [1]<\/a>\n\u201cMiddle class\u201d is a term that can have diverse meanings in nineteenth-century\nAmerica. The Beauvoir Veteran Project utilizes the financial class parameters\nfor poor, middle, and upper class utilized by Joseph Glatthaar in Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia:\nA Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee <\/em>(Chapel\nHill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 7. He defined the poorer\neconomic class as having a combined wealth (real and personal property) as\nranging from $0-$799, the middle class as $800 through $3,999, and the upper\nclass ranging from $4000 or more. In 1860, residents lived in families that\nenjoyed an average household wealth of almost $12,000. In 1870, that wealth\ndropped to $1,100, but remained solidly middle class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  [2]<\/a>\nOf those home-owners, nearly fifty-percent had paid off their mortgage. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Beauvoir Veteran Project Data Over a three-year period, researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi studied the Jefferson Davis Soldiers\u2019 Home in an effort to understand the experiences of the 1,845 men and women who lived there from 1903 through 1957. The team created a random representative ten-percent sample from a list of residents, and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beauvoirveteranproject.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beauvoirveteranproject.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beauvoirveteranproject.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beauvoirveteranproject.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beauvoirveteranproject.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/beauvoirveteranproject.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":406,"href":"https:\/\/beauvoirveteranproject.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions\/406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beauvoirveteranproject.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beauvoirveteranproject.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beauvoirveteranproject.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}