Work Description

Date: 27 April, 2025

Dataset Title: Digitizing Rossiter's Club Men of New York: 1901-02

Dataset Creators: RC Barnes, AC Alnimr, LN Carnes, DR Dedyne

Dataset Contact: [email protected]

Funding: University of Michigan-Flint, Undergraduate Research Opportunity Grant

Key Points:
- Transformed image files of club entry values into machine readable data.
- Provides social club memberships of some of the most powerful individuals at the turn of the Twentieth Century.
- Affords a glimpse into the social organization of New York City in 1900.

Research Overview:
This project extracted and digitized the data for each individual listed in Rossiter's Clubmen of New York, 1901-02. Published in 1902 and accessible through the HathiTrust Digital Library at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101007780792&seq=1, the volume consists of 908 scanned pages. The first 20 pages contain advertisements and seven photographs of the club buildings. The title page appears on scan 21, followed by the copyright page, preface, table of contents, and a list of illustrations and portraits. Scans 27 through 76 provide historical and descriptive sketches of 130 clubs, portraits and additional photographs of club buildings and advertisements. A listing of "Clubs and Organizations of which the entire membership appears in this volume with abbreviations" appears on scans 77 and 78. The following 10 scans (79 through 88) provide the "Clubs and Organizations in New York, of which the entire membership is not given, and some of the clubs and organizations in other cities to which member of New York clubs belong." The alphabetical listing of the 38,007 individuals begins on scan 89 and runs through 875. The remaining 33 scans contain additional photographs, advertisements and a listing of "Principal Clubs in the One Hundred Largest Cities of the United States" (scan 879 through 849). The data in this file only contains the information contained in the individual listings.

Overview of the Data:
The "method" for digitizing these individual listings consisted of displaying each page of the alphabetical listing in the HathiTrust as text, capturing the text, making sure that each individual is displayed on a single line, and inserting pipe delimiters into the text file to separate types of information. The pipe-delimited file was next imported into MicroSoft Excel. Each record has five fields, the first being an individual identification number that we assigned to each entry "IND_ID". The second field, labeled "Individual", is the Clubman's name as it appears in the publication in all upper case letters. Information on the Clubman's occupation is listed in the third column, "Occupation." The fourth column lists all of the clubs the individuals provided for their listings. Finally, the "Residence" column provides information for the Clubman's residence. Note, while there are data for club memberships for all of the records, many individuals did not provide occupational or residence data. The table below summarizes the data recorded:

Table 1: Summary of Data Coverage within File
Data Coverage Number
Individuals 38,007
Occupational Data Provided 28,437
Club Data Provided 38,007
Residence Data Provided 35,084

Clubmen with Complete records 25,592
Clubmen without Occupational data 9,492
Clubmen without residence data 2,845
Clubmen with only club memberships 78

Data Fields

IND_ID
Identification number that the research team assigned to each entry (row).

Individuals
All of the names have been standardized to read as follows: last name, first name or initial, middle name or initial, and suffix such as Jr. or II. Titles embedded within the names have been moved to the occupation field since the title often indicates the Clubman's occupation. Two common examples would be "M.D." and "D.D."

Occupations
The general structure of the occupational data field is a title if given, the occupation and the name of the business and or address of the occupation. In the instances where there are multiple occupations, the two occupations are listed together with the word "and," followed by the two addresses conjoined with the word "and."
For example, the entry for Henry R. Poor is listed as "banker, 18 Wall, and publisher, Poor's R. R. Manual, 44 Broad." These data have been restructured to read, "banker and publisher, 18 Wall and Poor's R. R. Manual, 44 Broad."

Clubs
Club memberships are listed alphabetically as opposed to the order in which they appear in the publication. All club abbreviations or names end with a period and are separated by a comma. There are inconsistencies in how the many individuals abbreviated the clubs and no attempt has been made to standardize these entries.
For example, while "Tav.", "Tav-Bo.", "Tav-Bos." and "Tavern-Bo." most likely all refer to the Tavern Club in Boston, we have preserved how the individuals recorded their club memberships.

Residence
The general structure of the residence data field is a place name such as a hotel or a club, followed by an address including city and state or country if provided. As with the occupational data, if two addresses are listed, the two residences are listed with comparable data listed together with the word "and" between the two listings.
For example, the entry for Jos. Leiter has the following listed under residence: "101 Rush, Chicago, and Dupont Circle, Washington." These data have been restructured to read, "101 Rush and Dupont Circle, Chicago and Washington."

Note on Data "Cleaning"
Given that the Optical Character Recognition of the image file did not always translate without errors, we have tried our best to catch these obvious errors. However, the data are far shy of being 100% clean and do not represent a perfect reproduction of the scanned images. We are relying on users of the data to alert us to any corrections that need to be made as you engage with the data.

Use and Access:
This data set is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC 4.0).

To Cite Data:
Barnes, R. C., Alnimer, A. C., Carnes, L. N., Dedyne, D. R. Digitized Data from Rossiter's Club Men of New York, 1901-2 [Data set], University of Michigan - Deep Blue Data. https://doi.org/10.7302/cqsr-mt70