Like America itself, New York City was built by immigrants. English, African, German, and Irish immigrants came to the United States in the 1700s and early 1800s. Italians and Jews arrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Asians, Hispanics, and Caribbean immigrants came to America in the late 20th century. New York has always been the number-one destination of immigrants to America, but every community in the country has felt the impact of immigration.

This activity will allow you to investigate layers of immigrant history in your community. A cemetery is a good place to start digging. With their headstones and mausoleums (above-ground burial vaults), cemetaries offer a record of the past that is often more reliable than any you will find elsewhere!

To begin, pick a cemetery in your community. Before you actually visit the cemetary be sure to consult a parent or teacher about your project. Ask your parent or teacher to help you get permission from the people who run the cemetary you want to visit. They might even be able to point you to older parts of the grounds.

Examine the headstones and mausoleums -- these usually offer several pieces of useful information. First, of course, are the names. Write down the last names that appear on several of the headstones. Make note of the person's date of birth and date of death, and observe any religious markings such as crosses, Stars of David, or crescents, which might give you a clue as to the religous and ethnic background of the person burried there. After taking careful notes, go home and use the Internet or your local library to research the ethnicity of the people burried in your town's cemetary.

To learn more about how names reflect ethnicity, you can check the following Web site:

Surnames: What's in a Name?
www.clanhuston.com
This Web site helps you investigate the origins of last names!

Or this book:

Hanks, Patrick and Flavia Hodges. A DICTIONARY OF SURNAMES. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

(Note: like most family-name sources, this book and Web site focus on European names. For non-European names, try typing in the words "surnames" or "geneology" into a search engine like Yahoo or Google on your computer. Many of these sites offer you a place to type in a name and give you information about it.)

The second piece of information you need to pay close attention to is the dates of birth and death you noted for each person. These dates will tell you when different ethnic groups lived in your community.

Now that you've collected your information, it's time to organize it! A table can help. You may want to create one like this:

This table is just a sample. It does not have enough names to provide a complete picture of who lived in your community and when. You have collected enough information to make your table much more informative than ours! Using this one as a model, organize the information you've collected in a table and see what is revealed about the immigrant history of your town!

You might also want to organize your information so that others can see the results. You can do this in several ways. First, establish the total number of graves you examined. Then, divide that number into groups by year of birth or death. For example, let us say you examined 50 graves: 25 of people born in the 1800s and 25 of people born in the 1900s. Make separate tables for each group. Now, count up the number of people in each ethnic group for the two tables and do the math. If, for example, 15 of the 25 names in the first group have Irish names, that means Irish represent 60 percent of the sample for the 1800s. And if, for example, 10 of the 25 in the second group have Hispanic names, that represents 40 percent. (To do this math, divide the total number into 100 -- 25 into 100 equals 4; then multiply the number of ethnic names by that number -- 10 times 4 equals 40, or 40 percent).

A nice way to present your data is in a chart. There are several kinds of charts. A useful kind for percentages is a pie chart. This is a round circle, like a pie, divided into slices. To begin, draw a circle. Then lightly pencil the straight lines inside. A vertical one down the middle divides it in half, and then a horizontal one divides it into quarters, or 25 percent. Using different colored pens or pencils, fill in amount for each ethnic group. 40 percent would fill one quarter plus most of another. Once you have completed the pie, write the name of each ethnic group inside or next to its slice of the pie. Finally, add a title to your chart and an explanation, so that people will know what they are looking at. See if your teacher will post it in your classroom.