I’ve always been interested in human migration. Not so much as a sociology project, more like reading an obituary in the local newspaper that reveals some long time resident who was born in some faraway place. It can be a complete stranger, I still become curious about how they got “here” from “there”.

Many came to Central Indiana with the automotive job boom of the 1950s and 60s. That was certainly true in the case of my wife’s family. They hailed from Florence, Alabama and small places tucked around that northern Alabama town. Fresh out of World War II my wife’s uncle decided he was going to Detroit to land a job in the automotive manufacturing world. He and his wife drove as far as Muncie, Indiana which is along I-69 on their way to Detroit. They stopped here for the night and while reading the local newspaper saw advertisements for auto jobs right here. They talked about it, and decided Muncie was closer to Alabama than Detroit, and if he could get the same job here then why not? It would make trips “home” a little closer so that’s what they did.

Once Uncle Norman had a job at the Delco Battery plant in Muncie, he told his brother, my future father-in-law, he could get him a job there too. That migration is how my wife got here for me to one day meet and marry her!

Most of the auto jobs eventually left, but not before many of those “migrant” workers retired and some of them hung around to their end.

Muncie is the home of Ball State University and you would be surprised at the number of those who came to work at the University and eventually made this their home, some from all around the globe. I’ve no doubt the community has benefited from the rich diversity these folks brought with them and shared with those of us lucky enough to get to know them as they raised families and otherwise lived out their life adventures among us.

My interest in this sort of migration was the foundation for much of the rag chewing I used to do via ham radio. If I worked a “3” who told me his QTH was Utah, I always asked how he got there, and the answer was often an interesting story. A kick-start for a deeper human connection that simply exchanging signal reports and antenna types, a sort of conversation lubricant.

Call signs no longer align with specific regions and that has mostly put the kibosh on that kind of rag chewing. Now I unravel migration stories from obituaries. When I see someone passed away at 80 years of age who was born and raised in Arkansas and attended college in Nebraska, I have an obsessive need to discover how they came to spend some portion of their lives here in Muncie. Although that’s getting tougher as the newspaper now charges five-hundred bucks for an average sized obituary listing and many families, looking to save some money on the spiraling costs of death and funerals, don’t submit obits anymore.

Online searches and mortuary web obituaries provide a bit of a toe-hold into digging out the many interesting stories of the constant migration of humans.