FactGrid:The Global Genealogy of Lodges

Masonic chart, 1846

The aim: To give a Genealogy of all the lodges that ever existed. When did they start? How were they affiliated?

If we had the framework we could think of involving lodges worldwide to gather membership information and to understand the development of the whole ensemble.

• All lodges in FactGrid ordered by date of establishment /in German (we could do far better.)

Think of a tree of all the lodges. Think of an animation that shows how Freemasonry spread over the globe. Think of a project which lodges worldwide can connect to and to which they can add virtual items like information of documents and objects in their possession.

The problem poses a load of things to think about.

Who would join this project to give it the necessary momentum?

This would be a project to run with a team of at least 10 people. One would love to have different fields of expertise on board:

• people with wide connections who can address other lodges as partners.
• programmers who know how to do mass inputs of data, people who can run interesting SPARQL queries on such data and who could create interfaces that would work on masonic websites.
• people with the necessary historical knowledge to understand what such a database should be able to tell us - we need the questions to do the constructive input and to get the interesting visualisations of data.

Where would we get the data to start with?

Creating masses of data-objects by hand is not much fun. One would love to run a major list input with basic data such as names, locations, internal identifiers, basic dates.

FactGrid will get the 8 data sets of GND data in the course of this year, but the GND data might not be the the best data to start with.

What would one like to know about Lodges

• mother lodge
• ritual (do they change?)
• names (some lodges change their names every couple of years)
• members (we can actually run SPARQL queries for the existing 90 lodges in FactGrid for first 18th-century results but the are not yet satisfying). The final project should tell us something about the connections of members, about their flow and about other affiliations they had. (Think of the Illuminati and how they pervaded and infiltrated lodges...)
• location (city)
• changing addresses over time
• Worshipful Master/ Meister vom Stuhl with dates in office

The genealogy

We should have an idea of the possible connections two lodges can have in order to give a good data model that will present nice trees of historical connections.

• Mother lodge
• Ritual
• ...

Some links

• Lanes Masonic Records
• Search of the German National Library GND-Data, 800 data sets - these data sets will become FacgtGrid objects during the next year.]
• Bossu
• Wikidata query a masonic lodge - 255 datasets strangely meager.