General Chat

At the end of the day the possibilites are endless! This is part of the reason I'm talking to people on here. I just wondered if anyone had ever thought about the area where their ancestors were and wondered whether some aspect of their lives was affected by the location of a specific service, their work or the cost of renting a property in specific areas.

It sounds really interesting, but very complicated! Look forward to hearing which aspect you decide to study, and how you get on.

London is not as frightening as you might think! A few years ago I worked for English Heritage in London and that is where I got my first taste of GIS work. My project was to map out the scheduled ancient monuments in the City of London and overlay them on modern maps. I then had to create layers showing any excavations that had taken place in or around these monuments. The idea was to provide planners etc with an idea of what was scheduled, what previous investigations had been done in the area, and if there were any archaeological finds they should be aware of if they wanted to develop around the site.

The ethnic makeup of the east end is already well documented, has anyone watched the programme on earlier this week about Spitalfields, and how its proximity to where immigrants landed has affected its population over the years?

Saz - I think anything is possible so long as you have the data, the time and the money! I'm actually trying to put together some sort of proposal to apply for funding for my Masters! At the moment I'm exploring ideas as I want to move away from what I did for my undergraduate dissertation as I don't think I can take the idea any further.

Great minds think alike - can we get a grant do you think?

Thread Killer - thats certainly a possibility. It might be interesting to see if particular streets attracted people from particular places just as much as trades affected where you might live.

I think the easiest thing would be to pick a town/village and choose one of the late 19th century editions of a map of the area thats close to a census year (e.g. on old maps you can see 1888-1890 maps). You can then use the census info along with the map to create any number of combinations. If you want to be really clever you can overlay a later map and later census data too to determine if things change.

Sarah Could you take an area in (for example) the East End of London and see where everyone living there was born? It's always described as a 'melting pot', but it would be interesting to know exactly what background makes up the typical 'Victorian Cockney'. Having said that, it sounds as if your project might be a bit more technical than that!

Hello again, I was musing over this thread and wondered whether you could use the census for a particular village and then map the surnames, trades, ages etc and then do the next census and so on. Starting from 1851 to 1901 this would give you a view of so many aspects of the village, effects of Industrial Revolution, employment, disease, growth/decline of the village, that sort of thing. This has really got me thinking, I love the "social" side of family history and I would definitely be interested in doing this kind of research myself - trouble is as I said before my rellies are in London - eek. Saz NB - thanks for getting the Booths website details, sorry I wasn't here to post it.

I've also seen GIS used on medieval burial grounds to see if there is any correlation between when a person was buried and their age, sex, and any ailments they may have had. At one site, connected to a Medieval hospital they were able to show how the function of the hospital had changed over time. During one period the burials were predominantly of young/middle aged females and babies which suggested the hospital was a maternity hospital of sorts. During another the burials were predominantly of older people with complaints like arthritis. It was suggested that at this point the hospital was for the elderly and infirm who could no longer work to support themselves.

I've found the Booth poverty maps online at http://booth.lse.ac.uk/ Now imagine using Booth's maps and overlaying where workhouses were or where factories were or even where churches were to see if there is any correlation between depreived areas and say workhouses :)

Try visiting http://216.31.193.171/asp/1_introduction.asp and play around the with data maps. This is the Environment Agency's website and you can choose which layers to show. Try looking at where landfill sites are in relation to rivers (not that I'd expect there to be any correlation!)

Well I guess as Saz indicates the Charles Booth surveys are the most detailed you could find. I may be wrong, but I think to do any other area may involve you in as much research to create the data as it would to actually do the project.

I'm trying to find some examples so that people can see what kind of things can be done! Basically, in theory, any kind of spatial data can be used!

I wondered is the LSE - Charles Booth survey into life and labour in London (1886-1903) a version of what you mean? I find these fascinating as many of my rellies lived in Kensington late 1800s to early 1900s in poverty but they gradually moved toward slightly less poverty stricken areas. (Probably shared with just one family of rats instead of ten!) The addresses where they lived are now worth millions, typical. Saz

I see Sarah, I guess the first thing to do would be to choose somewhere where you get sufficient data to make the map meaningful. At the end of the day, please tell me if I'm wrong, I guess the map is the simple part. But to make it interesting you have to accumulate sufficient data.

Mommylonglegs - don't delete your post at all :) Its good to have people joining in the discussion. I don't really want it to be all that technical! Andy - actually we do use CorelDraw to create layers before we import them into GIS packages where we can have more freedom in how we layer them and how they are spaced.

I think I understand the concept Sarah. A bit like CorelDRAW or perhaps many of the photo processing packages which use layers. I can understand the problem incorporating something like that into a web site!

Sorry. Think this is a bit too technical for me. Shall i delete my last post. I still find it very interesting though. Jenny