The Village Breakup

History Professor at Delta College, Jeremy Kilar writes this about the break-up of Volga-German communities, and rural German communities, in Michigan:

Rural Germans, like those from Russia and others who lived in small towns remained isolated in closed communities until World War I.

In most studies, of rural town disintegration, this is as far as it goes.  Usually, the scholar just speculates when the town broke up and why.  For cities, it is easy to detect individual immigrant neighborhoods breaking up because of assimilation due to jobs, anti-immigrant sentiment, or even upward mobility causing a particular group to move to the suburbs.

What this project hopes to uncover, by studying the specific town of Catharine, is to better understand why these Volga-German communities start to break-up as ethnic communities.  This will hapen through census numbers and oral interviews with older generations finding out why they moved away or stayed in Catharine. 

I've been reviewing the census data for the last few days and noticeably, there is a huge drop in population in Catharine.  The population in 1940 is 775 people.  Then, it drops to 537 by 1950, and to 381 by 1960.  In the span of twenty years, Catharine loses 400 people.  Unfortunately, the statistics only provide numbers and not reasons.  My job now is find out why that drop occurred.  I have inital hunches: World War II ended and the GI bill gave veterans an opportunity to build a life elsewhere, spikes in religious vocations, and farms lost profit.  We will see if I'm right soon enough.