HistoricalTownMaps Blog

Well it’s that time of year.  The trees are turning colors in New England, the air is crisper, and my kids are back in middle school and high school.  The excitement built up over the last couple of weeks.  New clothes, new backpacks, new school supplies, new sports uniforms, and the anticipation of seeing friends and loved ones.  Even yours truly is getting ready for his last semester at the University of Maryland, where I will complete my Master’s in E-Commerce this semester.

No matter what age - the memories of one’s schooling experience are so evocative - the memories of childhood crushes and first kisses, sports triumphs and disasters, academic success and failure, good and bad teachers, friends and rivals, first and last days of schools, concerts, dances, assemblies, parties, report cards, parent-teacher conferences, and ultimately graduations.

My children go to schools in a multi-town regional school district — there is one high school, 2 middle schools, and 4 elementary schools, and a central office.   Class sizes are based on a planning number of 18-20 students in elementary school and 20-23 students in later grades.   This regional centralization creates economies of scale for the region - enabled by a transportation network to get our kids to and from school and related activities.  However this is a very different experience than our ancestors as documented in Historical Town Maps.  When they went to school - it was more than likely they attended  decentralized one room schools in numerous school districts.

When I look at a Historical Town Map - I quickly gravitate to the school district breakdowns to understand which school district an ancestor lived.  As I write this, I am looking at an 1874 map of Bethlehem and Morris CT.  At that time, Bethlehem had 9 school districts and looking closely at the map you can see the icons for the schools in each district and their geo-spatial relativity to homes in the area.  And then you begin to realize - your great great grandparents actually having to walk long distances to and from school in all weather conditions.

The town of Bethlehem’s website has a page with  pictures of many of these one room schools.  One of those schools, the North Carmel Hill School had 12 children in all 8 grades.  That’s a very different experience than my kids.  These schools were administered by district committees, formed of residents within the district, who met its full cost and had complete autonomy over its operation.  School costs were met by a distribution among district “subscribers.”  In another school in Bethlehem, the Hard Hill School - teacher compensation was $1.50 a week if board was provided by a district subscriber or $5 a week if the teacher was self sustaining.  A fringe benefit was an agreement by the parents of the district to provide free firewood to the teacher.  What a far cry from the system my kids and their teachers are in.

As one would expect - there were wide disparities in educational instruction - from district to district, or town to town.   Different textbooks, teaching methods, experience levels, and training.  Slowly, towns formed consolidated school districts in the early 20th century, and then some further regionalized as is the case for my children.  These consolidations were the result arduous hard fought battles and legislative pressures - issues of local control vs. centralized control, town control vs. state commissioners of education, and of course the tax burden - whether you had kids or not.

But there remains a strong nostalgia around that one room schoolhouse - the backbone of the American public education system from the colonial period until (for some towns) the late 1930s/40s.  Study your maps, find out where ancestors went to school, and research those schools in your local historical societies.  There you might find reminiscences and pictures of past students and teachers that could include references to your ancestors and give you additional insight from whence you came.

Thoughts from the first day school of 2008. 

Good hunting,

Bernie

I have been a long time user Family Tree Maker to maintain my own genealogical research.  However I am still on the 2005 version - avoiding an upgrade to the 2008 version which was not well received in the genealogical community.  In a recent article by Jana Lloyd at Ancestry.com, the upcoming 2009 version has 2 location based features:

Migration Path - Family Tree Maker’s mapping tools allows one to plot their ancestor’s life on a map. All the events (birth, marriage, death) for which there is an associated location will appear. These maps are also printable.

Spatial Locality of Reference Research Support - Beyond just being able to create and view maps of an ancestor’s location based events, Family Tree Maker 2009 also provides support for searching for nearby cemeteries, libraries, courts, churches, hospitals, etc. to assist in field research.

These are welcome features to the Family Tree Maker product to help create location based insight to one’s family research.  It is supposed to be available on August 26th, 2008.

Good hunting

Bernie