PUTTING AGINCOURT ON THE WEB
The second of our weekly zoom chats this morning — I can give you the code, if you’d like to eavesdrop — was as productive as the first, though we still don’t have much to show. I’m glad of the slow beginning, however, since we’re laying a foundation for everything that will follow and those footings need to be sound. Slow and steady and all that.
Among the topics today was movement: After being introduced to Agincourt as both a place and an idea, it’s hard to predict where folks will want to go. Are they interested in people, business, culture generally or specific institutions, architecture, historical happenings, yatta, yatta? Hard to say. But in this context, up came the idea of linking genealogy with a site map and how those two notions might reinforce one another.
I’ve done a couple large genealogical charts (none of them for my own family) and found that the kinds of charts you can buy or download aren’t terribly useful for my purposes, because I’m interested in human relationships that stand well outside “family”; relationships which are lateral rather than linear; genealogy isn’t always about begetting. I could show you a very preliminary diagram (I’ll call it that) of a few dozen people instrumental in building and using the early Episcopal church buildings of Dakota Territory. It was my way of understanding the tangency of social, business, and highly personal connections among this cast of characters. Well, it’s on eight or ten horizontal sheets of note paper, taped together, which means it’s about eight feet wide. And the lines of interrelationship swoop and wiggle all over the place. It’s complex but reveals a lot about how the territory “worked”.
Googling “genealogy charts” brings up several types, all of them for sale and none of them very workable for our purposes. Then I discovered the chart above which attempts to show the hybridization of apples into the dozen or so varieties available at Cash Wise.
If any of you out there have some experience with this kind of thing, please let us know at: plains.architecture@gmail.com.
[#1464]