Team

Data

The two historic collections used for the project are the Samuel Chester Clough map collection and the Annie Haven Thwing database. Both collections are housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) in Boston.

The Samuel Chester Clough collection consists of the maps, tracings, neighborhood drawings and notes made by the nineteenth-century Boston cartographer. Interested in tracing his family history and wanting to create maps of seventeenth-century Boston, Clough began to research Boston’s early history using The Book of Possessions as his main primary source for information on inhabitants and their land ownership. The Book of Possessions was a typed compilation of Boston’s early municipal meeting notes from its settlement through the 1660s. It also includes a rough sketch of Boston in the seventeenth-century by George Lamb, but little remains on the background of Lamb and his map. Lamb’s map was the basis for Clough’s inspiration to map the city. 


George Lamb’s “Plan of Boston showing existing ways and owners on December 25, 1635.”  Courtesy of  the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center. 

The Annie Haven Thwing database was also the result of a genealogy project. In the 1920s, Thwing decided to research her family’s history, which dates back to the early settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The result of her extensive research was an index card collection on over 50,000 Boston inhabitants that lived in the area between the 1630s and the 1820s. She later used her meticulous archive to publish a book called The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston. In the 1990s, the MHS copied and digitized the index card collection so it can be used as a database to research Boston inhabitants. The basis for her research was also the early records of Boston’s meeting minutes, but it is unknown whether she used The Book of Possessions for her work, as well. 

“The Birth of Boston” specifically uses the digitized 1648 Clough map, which is found on the MHS website and the Thwing database that is found at the MHS.

Timeline & Research Process

“The Birth of Boston” stemmed from preliminary research Chris had done in the fall of 2017 to determine if there was any colonial Boston visualizations that existed for his undergraduates to use. Through the MHS, he found both the Thwing and Clough collections, and the idea to merge the two was born. 

Molly used the Thwing database to collect preliminary research on forty Bostonians found on the 1676 Clough map, using Clough’s labels for the land parcels along colonial Commercial Street. Various stages of the project turned into her final project for her “Introduction to Digital History” course and her “Digital Space and Place” course during the 2017-2018 academic year. 

The project grew under the support of the Boston Research Center during the summer of 2018, and funding allowed Molly and Matt to research Clough at the MHS to study his mapping and research methods. Matt and Molly also compared Clough’s work with Thwing’s to validate that his research was correct. For completion purposes, the project switched to using the 1648 map over the 1676 map during this stage in preliminary research.

Data Collection & Cleaning

Matt collected all of the information on each inhabitant of Boston that was noted on Clough’s 1648 map using the Thwing database. He transferred this data into a Google spreadsheet using standardized data points from the headings Thwing had for each person (Last name, First name, Occupation…etc). A full list of data points used for each citizen can be found on the webpage page (“1648 Map“) under the legend. 

The team later decided to break up the general heading “Events” into more explanatory sections for better use of the data. Thwing initially had any detailed records of an inhabitant put under this heading, but we wanted to have stronger descriptors used for our dataset, so each event noted for the inhabitant fits under one of the below fields:

  • Office: Any town office held by the land owner. 
  • Church: Any religious or church-related events related to the land owner, like the admission of family members into the church or baptisms.
  • Legal: Any legal or court noted documentation about the citizen. This includes court orders, fines, and testimonies before court.
  • Property: Any property information including land grants given to or by the land owner. The purchasing or exchange of wharves would also be found in this section.
  • Municipal: Any interaction the individual had with the city that was not a legal matter. This includes tax records, placement of roads near an owner’s land or where the inhabitant migrated from.
  • Commercial: Any commercial activity of the land holder (running a business, opening an establishment that sold alcohol… etc)
  • Event: Any other miscellaneous events or details noted in the Thwing collection about the inhabitant. 

Once the data set was finished, Molly cleaned the data on Microsoft Excel to standardize any empty fields and regularize any dates. 

Webmap 

The geo-rectified map of Boston used for the webmap was found through Harvard University’s MapWarper site. 

Molly used ArcMap 10.4.1 to create the interactive webmap. She used the TIFF file of the geo-rectified map and map data of contemporary Boston found through Analyze Boston for her GIS baselayers.

She then geo-referenced the 1648 map with a polygon layer of data that outlined the land parcels Clough includes on his map. Matt also helped to geo-reference half of the map. The geo-referencing layer allowed for the geographical information of the land parcels to be saved into an attribute table which Molly merged with the spreadsheet of citizen data to create the clickable land parcels found on the final webmap (green layer). 

The GIS data was uploaded to ArcGIS Online and embedded into this website using the WordPress Plugin Webmaps for WordPress.

For More Information…

For more information on the process of creating the 1648 webmap, please read the team members’ blog posts found on the Boston Research Center website.