Synesthesia

A few months ago I spent some time exploring my wife’s family tree. One fragment of jigsaw was a census return from 1851 showing one of her 3–greats-grandfathers, then age 16, living with his parents at 13 Cambridge Street in Soho.

I looked at the current London street map and found there is no Cambridge Street in Soho any more, and that was the end of my curiosity.

Skip forward to last week, and I finally got around to reading Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.

Johnson takes as his central theme the story of John Snow, and his pioneering work with Henry Whitehead during and after the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho which proved for the first time that cholera was a water-borne infection.

One of the key tools used by Snow was to plot the course of the outbreak on a map. Looking at the map I realised I had found Cambridge Street – the old name for the upper part of what is now Lexington Street.

The slightly more detailed general Board of Health Map based on Snow’s work also shows the old house numbers – and this shows number 13, just 7 doors down from the infamous pump which spread the disease.

The coincidence is that a direct ancestor of my wife lived in a house which, three years after evidence of their residence, was in the centre of a particularly virulent and well-documented outbreak of cholera. Today, in a modern city, that would be worthy of comment: in Victorian London perhaps less so.

We have no way of knowing if they were still in residence three years after the census, and thus survivors of the outbreak, but even if they had moved on, the descriptions of the Broad Street area provide a fascinating insight into the circumstances in which they lived.

More interesting, to me at least, are the aspects of my curiosity which set up this piece of serendipitous discovery – family history, networks of connections, a lifelong fascination with maps and the story they tell, and the ever-fascinating mental game of “What if… ?”

Technorati Tags Genealogy, History, JohnSnow, London, Soho

This site is an interesting adjunct to my previous note on geneaology - the surname profiler from UCL lets you compare the geographical distribution of a given surname in the UK between 1881 and 1998.

I did a quick test using my surname (Elve - or as it was commonly spelled in 1881, Elvey). The 1881 result looks familiar from the 1881 census research I have been doing as part of finding my ancestors:

The 1998 map is less useful - even though the spelling I use (Elve) is reasonably well-established, there is no mention of it in the database. So for 1998 I again searched on the “Elvey” spelling.

Nevertheless an interesting site.
[surname profiler found via A day in the life of a middle manager]

Technorati Tags Elve, Genealogy

This place has been looking rather dormant - and I realised that I was sinking into a negative loop - the longer I didn’t write here, the harder it seemed to start. So consider this a metaphorical “get in there and do something”…

It’s not that I’ve not been busy - but a lot of that has been the sort of things I don’t write here (details of work stuff, and family life etc.) - and the things of which I might write have seemed so absorbing at the time that writing has not been on the agenda.

One thing that has been taking up a bit of time is a programming project to provide a web remote control to ITunes - [bliki]WebTunes[/bliki]. Unfortunately not much further than a proof of concept (spare time programming with something as complex as .Net is far from efficient!), but I might post some code if anyone is interested.

The other thing that has led to a few late nights is “looking for dead people” as someone described it - a resurgent interest in some family history research. I’ve fairly reliably traced my paternal line (Elve) back to the early 1800’s, and one of my mother’s ancestors ( Micklewright) back to about 1820. There are significantly more sources online than when I last looked at this about five years ago, but again I’m coming to the point where I can see a need to track down some primary sources - and that was where I lost steam before!

A few online resources that I have found useful in different ways: ancestry.com, Genes Reunited and FamilySearch.org.

I shall stop now whilst I’m ahead.

Technorati Tags Elve, Genealogy, iTunes, Micklewright, Programming, WebTunes