October 2019 Issue
MORE BIG DATA & GENEALOGY RESEARCH
October already! Before the holidays claim our attention, let's take a look at more Big Data projects that help genealogists. (Click on the blue link if you missed Big Data projects featured in the August issue of First Friday Genealogy.)
Big Data projects help researchers visual information in new ways. For genealogists, Big Data is especially valuable to understand the historical events and socio-economic trends that affected our ancestors. Let's take a look at some new projects.
Experts from the Scottish Witchcraft Survey at the University of Edinburgh have combined church and court records with maps for a new project called Places of Residence of Accused Witches. This Big Data project brings to life the persecution of women during the period, with many burned at the stake or drowned.
Said one project member, "The tragedy is that Scotland had five times the number of executions of women. The idea of being able to plot these on a map really brings it home. These places are near everyone.... We need to be remembering these women, remembering what happened and understanding what happened."
The video above was designed by Slate magazine’s Andrew Kahn, to visualize the appalling scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade “across time, as well as the flow of transport and eventual destinations. The dots—which represent individual slave ships—also correspond to the size of each voyage. The larger the dot, the more enslaved people on board. And if you pause the map and click on a dot, you’ll learn about the ship’s flag—was it British? Portuguese? French?—its origin point, its destination, and its history in the slave trade.”
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database documents nearly “36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual number is estimated to have been as high as 12.5 million [persons]. The database and the separate estimates interface offer researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.”
Patriot Paths uses Revolutionary War pension records, census, and other records to "map the paths that soldiers took before and after their service. Staff and interns at the Library & Archives have pored over pension files to find the dates and places where the soldiers were born, married, enlisted and died. About 2,000 pension files exist for soldiers who came to Tennessee and about 1,200 have been entered so far. Historians and genealogists can use the tools to search for veterans and study the patterns of migration."
Patriot Paths can be accessed on the Library & Archives website at sos.tn.gov/tsla or by clicking here.
Many thanks to the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa for including me in the 25th annual conference. Excellent organizers and even better attendees with great questions.
If you're doing research in this area, a membership in BIFHSGO will pay off handsomely.
Looking for new ways to find archives, maps, newspapers, and books and other genealogy resources?
