Emigres from Udbina, Croatia (Lika Province), Part 1: Who and When

As I pointed out in a previous post, I have been gathering information about Udbina emigres.  Given that my family is pretty tall (at 6'5", I am one of the short-one's in the family).  I wanted to see if all that height comes from Udbina.

Here's the distribution of height for males coming from Udbina:

At 6'5" (77") I am clearly off the charts.  But we have to compare it to the baseline of the time.  Most of the men were migrating in 1900.  In 1900, males were 5'6" (66" on average).  Compared to that baseline, the men of Udbina were fairly typical.  The mean and median height were 5'7", an inch above average.

I have focused on the men, because not many of the women from Udbina made the trip:

Over 96% of the people who made the trip (or at least of those who came up in the search) were men. Most of the men in the database made the trip right around the turn of the century:

In fact, most of the men traveled between 1901 and 1904.  Here's a close up of the previous figure (but focused on the pre-1920 period).  Andrew came after this big wave:

Andrew may have come a bit later simply because he was younger.  When he migrated in 1905 he was still only 17.  Here is the distribution of how old people were when they migrated.  Andrew was young and so may only have come once he was old enough to work and/or once there was already a network on the ground in the U.S. to support him once he came. 

Another way of looking at age, is to look at the year of birth for emigres (these are all people who were born in Udbina):

Again, Andrew was one of the younger ones coming out of Udbina. 

Although most of the passengers were men, the majority were married (leaving their wives back in Udbina).   Andrew was among the men who were single when they came. 

From what we can see, many of these married men never had their wives join them.  There were certainly exceptions.  In the 1,211 passengers we have, only 7 are of women joining their husbands.  Here's one example of someone coming from Andrew's home village of Kurjak and also heading to McGill, Nevada (see passenger 16):

Basta is actually a family name so this is someone who is likely be somewhat closely related to Andrew.  However, there seems to be lots of women who never made the trip.  Here's one document (a passport application) that suggests some of the women who did come decided to go back to Udbina.  In this case, the daughter, who is applying for a passport was born in 1908, but went back to Udbina in 1921 to live with her mother:

More coming next time...