Blacks in the 1860 and 1870 San Jose censuses

I didn't have access to the materials in the California Room over the weekend, so I browsed through the 1860 census for the city of San Jose. I found 47 individuals listed as either black or mulatto. Did the same thing for 1870, where there were 107 black or mulatto individuals listed. From those lists, I was able to identify about a dozen early pioneer black families in San Jose. They can be tracked in the San Jose city directories, later censuses, obituaries, and other sources. Many of these families are mentioned in Negro Trailblazers. And in Pioneer Urbanites, one of the oral history informants is a descendant of the Alfred J. White family of San Jose.

Monday morning I looked up the Overton family obituaries. Sarah Massey Overton's included her photograph. Both her husband and son were officers in the Masons and the Odd Fellows, so that will be helpful when we look at black fraternal organizations.

Many of the McCall photographs were done at the local Bushnell photo studio, and Charles Overton's obituary said that he worked "for the past 38 years in the chemical department of Bushnell studio." That's a nice puzzle piece to find!

I'll see some of you at the meeting this afternoon.

Why a Blog...

...because when I'm doing research I constantly want to write or phone my collaborators to share what I'm finding to see how it fits their work. This can be a way to keep it all in one place: what I want to say and how you wish to respond.

Iris gave me as a first task to reconstruct the black clubwomen scene in San Jose. That appears to begin with Sarah Massey Overton and the Garden City Women's Club between 1906 and 1908. The tribute to Sarah Overton on pages 232 and 233 in Negro Trail Blazers was written in 1914 by Sarah Severance, a white woman and a fellow member of San Jose's Political Equality Club. This suffrage organization numbered among its members all the most prominent professional women of San Jose at the time (See Ten Years in Paradise, p. 75).

Concerning the McCall collection: Did we know that Sarah Overton's son Charles was a professional photographer? That's what he told the census taker between 1900 and 1930. I'll follow up more with that in his obituary and in the city directories.