The Bank Transaction Database

This database contains every transaction (each deposit, withdrawal, and interest payment) and the date it occurred for a 20% sample of the 18,000 accounts opened at the Emigrant Savings Bank from 1850 to 1858. (The ledgers containing the transactions for accounts numbered 18,001 and higher are not extant.) Historians will probably not have much use for this data, but economists will be able to use it to document the advent of banking panics, seasonal swings in the mid-nineteenth-century economy, and a host of other topics. By linking the information in this database to the Depositor Database, scholars can see, for example, if day laborers had to dig into their savings more often to make it through seasonal unemployment than carpenters or peddlers; if Irish immigrant customers of the bank used it differently than its German or American-born customers; if the Irish were more likely to engage in “coupon clipping” (immediately withdrawing interest after the bank paid it) than other groups; or if those who lived near the bank made more visits to its offices than those who lived farther away. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Download The Bank Transactions Database here.