Background

It has been difficult to visualize Boston’s early history prior to the first map of the city in 1722. In the late nineteenth-century, Boston cartographer Samuel Chester Clough attempted to remedy this problem by crafting maps of Boston using inhabitant data found in The Book of Possessions, but never completed the project. “The Birth of Boston” is a twenty-first century attempt at reviving Clough’s venture into discerning what Boston looked like and who lived there during its settlement.

“The Birth of Boston” is an interactive webmap of colonial Boston that allows users to click on land parcels to learn about each inhabitant that lived there. The 1648 webmap is accessible on this website, but the larger project, as it expands, will be found through the Boston Research Center website. 

Clough’s maps are the basis for the geographic information we have on the land ownership of settlers, but the second resource for this digital project comes from the Annie Haven Thwing collection. At the turn of the twentieth- century, Thwing researched and created a corpus detailing the lives of over 50,000 Boston inhabitants from 1630 to 1822. This database of citizen information was used to give a “face” to the names that Clough has depicted on his map.

Explore

Documentation on the digitization and data collection process for this project can be found in the “Methodology” tab of this online space. The webmap itself can be found on the “1648 Map” page.

Support

The development of this project would not have been possible without collaboration with the Massachusetts Historical Society, support and funding from the Boston Research Center, and funding from the NULab for Texts Maps and Networks.