Historical GIS Demonstration: Postal Savings in Pennsylvania, 1925-1935

Recent research by Stefan Firtko on the United States Postal Savings System in Pennsylvania includes the digitization of postal savings data, banking data, and 1930 census data for the state of Pennsylvania at the county level.

Postal data digitized in this project include total deposits and number of depositors for each participating post office, along with the computation of statistical measures. These data were also mapped into a county-level summary for the state in each year from 1925-1935. Firtko's fall 2006 PowerPoint file summarizing GIS contributions to the project is available from the You are Here: Scholarship and Geographical Information Systems presentation page.

 

The following map depicts the mean deposit in a postal account by county in 1925. A higher-resolution map can be loaded by clicking on the map.

Example data from the 1930 census includes household data for foreign-born residents; the following map depicts the total foreign-born population by county.

Our data stores include nationality data for most European countries; the same linked dataset can be queried for specific nationalities. The following map, produced from the same 1930 census dataset, shows the Czechoslovakian immigration patterns in Pennsylvania.