Mapping the locations in local Schools' Collection

2022-04-18T16:52:42Z

Hello internet. Due to physical space restrictions 'making' has mostly taken a back seat lately. And instead I've wandered down a couple of new rabbit holes; history and mapping.

In the 1930's the Folklore Commission put in place a voluntary program for schools, to get the pupils to collect folklore and local knowledge from relatives and older people in the area. The result is The Schools' Collection from The Dúchas Project. Through the website you can transcribe parts of the childrens' reports. The English language ones are mostly done (though sometimes can use a few corrections), but the Irish language ones need some work. (So if you're confident in your Irish please give it a go.)

I started reading all the entries for my local area, and had trouble trying to spatially understand their world. Between some places having different names, and their world occupying a different (and larger) area than I am familiar with, I turned to maps to try and sort it all out. But, it turns out, no one map has all the data I needed. Eventually I found my way to signing up for OpenStreetMap, because the editing section has access to satellite imagery, and an old map, that I could comb through.

(I found this youtube playlist very helpful for getting started, and beginning to understand the topics I'm dealing with.)

But, it turns out, that OSM wants to exist for current, modern features, not old historical stuff. There is a way (see the playlist above) to merge the two in many cases, but sometimes there is no room for it on OSM. So I wandered over to uMap (based on OSM) and started manually tagging the locations that are mentioned in The Schools' Collection for my local area.

I left out generic place names that are still the same, and local businesses (e.g. two forges, a linen mill, and a tailors), and had to deduce (sometimes outright guess) where a location might be. In the end there's only one that I couldn't even take a guess at;

A hill, Blackburn's Moat, in Knockheather, about a mile outside [the town].
"The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0773, Page 234" by Dúchas © National Folklore Collection, UCD is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

(I also don't know where the school that wrote the reports was either (I can't find an address anywhere), funnily enough.)

After all of that, here's the result in interactive map format! I made little notes on each of the locations, with links back to Dúchas. Please excuse any errors, this is the first version.

Screenshot of the resulting tagged map
Screenshot by chebe

*edit* And thanks to Amanda for all the pointers!

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Mapping the locations in local Schools' Collection