General Chat

Margret What you suggest would be a horrendous task The "gaming idea" I think would be possible It would however require the programmer to know who lived where and when his occupation the place where he worked The church he was baptised/christened in when he went to war where he was trained And this is only for "your respective family" Yes you could even make the village a walk through environment and enter the houses to see the people who lived there eating there sunday lunch !! wearing hats with there names on, you could even bring them to life and speak !!! The possibilities are endless And I gave up playing games many years ago Perhaps there are programmers out there who can compile all of this data and sell it commercially but think of the cross referencing that would need to be undertaken Paul

Hey, I've finally done something intelligent! I have been doing this very thing, with an old map and loads of sheets of tracing paper, plotting my extremely complicated family and their moves around a small area (of Lancashire!) It has helped me make some links I had missed and correct some mistakes I had made. It's a big, amateurish coloured-pens mess at the moment, but I understand it - had absolutely no idea that this could be done "properly". What I would really like to know, from a social point of view is why my family, descended from one man born in 1700, swelled to at least 420 living descendants in 1820, but by the late 1800s was simply fizzling out. Many never married, those who did had few children (surely no contraception then, they were working-class people) and those few children often died young. I suspect the genes were "tainted" by then as much intermarrying had gone on over the centuries. I can trace the ancestral name back to 1137, they were very prolific breeders, so did it take 700 years of interbreeding to finally finish them off? They came from a small village, population 700 in 1700, only half a dozen surnames, everyone married everyone else - but why did my family die out and the others went from strength to strength? As for Workhouses etc , am I being particularly dense when I say that Workhouses would surely appear where there was a need for them, i.e. in poor areas. Industrial areas would appear where it was "good" for them to be. The Lancashire Cotton Mills sprang up in damp valleys, with good access/transport to major cities. A Cotton Mill on top of an inaccessible mountain wouldn't have lasted very long. Surely communities grew around a need to be in a certain place for a certain reason - there are many abandoned and now forgotten communities which were once thriving, abandoned presumably because the need to be there was no longer as pressing as the need to be somewhere else for economic reasons. Fascinating! Its got me thinking, thanks for this thread and let me know if you decide to do a thesis on why the Holdens of Lancashire died out, tee hee.

Marjorie Wow !! however did we do things properly before computers !!!! What you are doing is exactly how we used to draw different information to add to a master drawing in the 70"s They are called overlays You could then see if things clashed !!! much like families!!! Computer drawing i must admit is quicker and more accurate, providing you enter the correct data !! The advantage of producing a drawing this way is that you can zoom in to a raster image and accurately outline a building however small This may be technical to some but it all started with a pen some ink and a rapidograph pen !!! Who remembers rotring !! or for that matte lining pens in the compass box Paul

Hi, This is fascinating. The technology is over my head but I think it would be interesting to look at the Welsh valleys in the 19thC when they were opening up the steel works and sinking the pits. Censuses show people coming from every county in Wales and a huge influx of Somerset people plus other English counties. Gwynne

Its something that I'm already doing Sarah. Drake Software produces a number of programs for genealogists, among which are the MACH series which have census data for particular UK counties and map the name distributions - or indeed any other searchable element you might wish to display - down to parish level for a particular county. The other program BIRDIE can take any data you chose to input (it can import GEDCOMs) and will map that to parish level for any county that's loaded, and to county level for the rest. At the moment the MACH series are limited to BKM, BRK and BDF, with BKM61 and OXF51 coming on line this year, and the BIRDIE county maps are similarly limited - but as time (and the day job) permits I shall be producing parish maps for the whole of the UK and Ireland - which can be slotted into BIRDIE and extending the MACH series as and when FHS's accept the possibility of publishing data in this way. For an (out of date!) view of the programs visit www.drake-software.co.uk - time permitting the web site will be updated soon. Hugh Ainsley - Drake Software

Sarah, I think that's a fascinating idea and would love to see it put into practice, but it could run into trouble due to the constant migration of people around, as well as in and out of, this country since the Industrial Revolution. CB >|<

Are you guys aware that the Mormons have a project afoot to map England at least for all the different administrative boundaries there have been, layering them over standard maps? This is a long term project and so far they have been looking at East Anglia, with nothing on the web, but I dare say they'll let us know when they are a little further forward. There is, by the way, a brilliant book of maps for Norfolk, covering all sorts of data. B

Oh Paul, it must have been the rapidographs wot dunnit then, I found a box of these that used to belong to my Dad, also a box of Rotring pens!(My Dad was a draughtsman, I AM NOT!) Im also very interested in the Drake maps thingy, I'm off to look at the website now, dont mind it being out of date, so am I!. The idea of a "Simcity" type programme is also interesting and personally, I cant see that entering all that data would be any worse than trying to enter it on my family tree. Another interesting sur vey, done years ago, compared the distance between the birth places of a married couple. In 1700 it was averaged at less than 5 miles, by 1800 it was averaged at 15 miles, by 1900 it was 50 miles - wonder what it is now, and how interesting to just concentrate on a small village and see how things have changed in 300 years.