This summer, I worked with Professor William Meyer and Nathaly Tlaseca Verde ’26 on Professor Meyer’s topic of researching accidental death rates in cities and rural areas of Massachusetts in the 1880s. Our research targeted the question of whether urban areas were more prone to accidental injuries and deaths or vice versa, if rural areas were more prone to accidental injuries and deaths. Our research was built upon the debate among previous researchers in said topic and to answer our research question, we dived into the historical death records of the state of Massachusetts, one of the earliest and most well-documented records in the United States.
To conduct our research, Nathaly and I scoured through the death records, and we spent the summer creating a database using excel, documenting accidental deaths recorded in three specifically selected Massachusetts’ counties (Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire). We then filtered the accidental deaths by confirming their cases using historical newspapers from a digitized newspaper database, removing ones we deemed not accidental as well as confirming the exact circumstances of accidental deaths that were vaguely described on the state records. Furthermore, in order to better showcase our study area, I created two maps of the three counties and their subdivision areas in the 1880s using ArcGIS, highlighting areas that we defined as cities compared to areas we defined as rural.
