When Robert Macieski looks at Manchester sprawled out before him, he doesn't see what everyone else sees. Where there are apartment buildings and tree lined neighborhoods, he sees the ghosts of immigrant clusters finding kinship among strangers. Where there are restaurants and businesses, he sees women and children working from sun up to sundown to put food on the table for their families.
These people may have lived and died more than 100 years ago, but Macieski, Associate Professor of History and Director of Museum Studies at UNH Manchester, knows their names, knows where they came from and how they lived. And now, with a project more than 10 years in the making, everyone else will be able to know them as well.
Though still in its early stages, Macieski's web site People and Places will tell the story of how Manchester grew from mill town to metropolis. With the help of Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping software, census data going back to 1790, city directories and historic maps, trends and patterns of the past and present can be represented on a map allowing anyone who is interested to analyze the trends and patterns that emerge.
"This is about how we can display the past, how we can present the past to people who may not be interested in reading huge monographic tomes, but who can play interactively with this material and investigate themselves how things are changing in the city of Manchester," Macieski says.
For example, Macieski says, by inputting census data, someone using the web site could discover concentrations of different ethnic groups, or even concentrations of people based on their skills, family sizes, and ages of children.
"It enables you to search in a variety of different ways," Macieski says. "The parents' background, parents' language, the parents' place of birth-- so you can connect their place of origin with their new position within the city. So I can look at the city within different time periods, and I can say, 'Oh there's a concentration of Russians in Ward 7 and there's a concentrations of French Canadians everywhere.'“
"It enables us to connect primary and secondary sources together," adds Macieski.
By using historic maps, overlaid onto the GIS, researchers can also see the physical changes that have taken place in the Manchester landscape over the years.
"For example, from an 1850s map we can see that the city changed the course of the Merrimack river between 1850 and 1860," he says. "So there are all kinds of little things to come out of it."
And Macieski doesn't see this limited to just Manchester. He says this is something that can be done for any municipality and could even be used as a tool by Social Studies teachers in schools to enhance the curriculum. He also says he thinks other disciplines can benefit from his web site. For example, those studying politics could study voting trends and habits throughout the years. Those studying archaeology could learn and develop new theories about Native Americans in New Hampshire from the mapping of artifact finds. The site could even be used to record present day history, he says, allowing people to leave recordings of their own oral histories or descriptions of favorite places pinned to the map.
"I don’t see it limited just to Manchester, but really to anywhere in the world," he says.
For right now though, Macieski is focused on Manchester and the state. Currently, he uses the portion of the site that's finished in his survey classes at UNH Manchester to teach immigration and urban development. He also uses it for his colloquium students, which allows them to do original research.
"This was my way of bringing together hundreds of primary sources and allowing my class to get a head start on this and develop their own original research from this material," he says.
Macieski's next steps are to try to get grant funding to get the GIS software up and running as well as get the rest of the data he's collected onto the web site.
"I have been doing it primarily by myself," he says. "But now I want students to help me develop it. I have a lot of material online, but I have much more offline and I want to have my students to develop the project further. I want them to see the wide variety of primary sources are available and what we can say with them. I want them to get to work as historians. "
Request more information about the History program at UNH Manchester.
