Preservation Path

For my final project, I wanted to focus on immigration patterns during the early 1960s, when my own family immigrated.

Using their information as a type of case study, I want to find out how many people came over in the same fashion they did (on a cruise liner, the Dutch SS Statendam, and in 1960 they did not go to Elis Island but to the immigrations office in New York), and find out how many people immigrated in general, from where, for what reasons, so on and so forth. I want to use the SS Statendam to create a map that charts what route they took, but also take the information of where everyone was immigrating from and to where in the United States and make another more active map. For these parts of the project I would use programs such as Photoshop just to create short and simple .gif files.

I also want to create a few charts to show in a more effective way how many people immigrated in 1964 and which ethnic backgrounds these people had.

Some software and hardware I’d use to index some of the pictures I have of my family would be the Zeutschel scanner I have at work and then add them to a personal photosharing account like Flickr or Photobucket to make it easier to share and move them to other sites or online folders.

One interesting point I found already through online research is that my family came over during a time of restriction, but there were a lot of refugees from South East Asia because of the Vietnam War. It’s also during the same year that Civil Rights Act was passed. They came over a year before the Origin Quota was dismissed, and I would like to find out more about it and how it effected peoples’ immigration processes.

The graph above is a sample graph that I found on the History of U.S. Immigration Laws website. In the 60s it looks like Europeans in general made up 50% of immigrants to the U.S., along with people from South America and and some people from Asia. I would like to find more solid numbers and make a more readable graph for myself.

That’s all I really have for right now! I’m making progress though, I just need to get down to the more nitty gritty things to make the portfolio for our final project.