The aim of the Prototype project was to develop a "proof of concept" which would demonstrate the feasibility of matching Household geographical data with Heritage Group genealogical data - something in which the A. F. Church maps would play a central role. The driving idea was a publicly-accessible web service – a kind of Facebook for dead people – with distinct community and household-level applications, and the first phase was to develop the engine.
We used the 1881 Canadian census for the genealogical data. The census plays a special role in genealogical work. It is often not the most interesting data which exists, and seems to have as many transcription and interpretative errors as any other administrative dataset. In fact, transcription errors may be becoming more common, as contemporary workers find it more difficult to read cursive script. What distinguishes census data, though, is its universality: its ambition is to be completely comprehensive, creating an inventory of every individual soul who was alive within the country. This comprehensiveness makes the census the "data mothership" of genealogy, with other, smaller datasets tieing into the census as a universal framework.
We did work in four communities for the prototype. These communities were considerably different in character then, as they continue to be today:
- Durham & the West River of Pictou - agricultural, with market centre, overwhelmingly Scottish ethnicity, dissenting Presbyterians;
- Heatherton in Antigonish county - agricultural, with market centre, overwhelmingly Scottish ethnicity, Roman Catholics;
- New Ross in Lunenburg county - forestry, with market centre, multiple ethnic and religious strands, although the foundations were English and Anglican;
- Old North End Halifax - urban, trades, personal services, and labourers, mixed religion although the Irish Catholics were the largest cultural group;
We experimented with two other historical maps first: in Halifax, we used the Hopkins maps of 1888 which are compelling for the high level of detail they provide; in Durham, we used the Pictou county atlas of 1889 which shows property boundaries as well as names. In both cases, these maps were printed as a set of tiles, and it leads to difficulties with topographic errors in the joins between the tiles. In New Ross and Heatheron, we used the A. F. Church maps with good success. Of course, because these maps are drawn for an entire county, there is no problem with tile joins. We had another asset, though: both the Lunenburg county and the Antigonish county maps happened to be produced close to 1881 - for Lunenburg in 1883 and for Antigonish in 1878 - and this made the matching job relatively easy.
The technical goals for the prototype work were to develop a program which:
- uses open source software;
- requires only a stand-alone browser;
- provides for user upload and display with no programmer involvement; and
- allows for multiple different file types (text, images, documents).
As the historical data is organized by household and by community, we have the opportunity to develop community aggregates and household profiles at each geographic level. Our expectation for the full-scale platform is that the community aggregates would be freely available to the user, while the household profiles would require a user fee. Interactive views of a community would be provided on a searchable map, from which navigation could proceed to household profiles for specific detail. Household profiles would be derived based on joining the different data components, and the GIS capabilities provide the means to compare immediate neighbours, physical distances to other households with similar attributes, and the like.
The prototype was successful in achieving the technical goals, in developing some tools to examine community aggregates, and in demonstrating proof-of-concept. In doing this, we managed to match census information for a few hundred households in each of the several geographical locations. It is a large and ongoing project, and we have completed the technical "build" of a laboratory prototype.
KITH is working with heritage groups in Antigonish, Hants and Halifax counties to preserve and digitize the A. F. Church maps and match the map information with existing genealogical records. The goal is to improve our understanding of the history and social relations in nineteenth century Nova Scotia, and make this data publicly accessible.
