FactGrid:The Global Genealogy of Lodges
An increasingly international pictureFactGrid started with data on the Illuminati. The first data sets we incorporated were enriched with masonic backgrounds of the protagonists we were dealing with — the Illuminati had been subverting lodges and this was something Hermann Schüttler had tracked with the data he brought into the mirst major input in 2018. Christian Wirkner added about 800 members of Göttingen's late 18th century lodges from his dissertation, at the tim, in July 2018, with an interest in the Illuminati overlaps. A first massive import of (mostly) German lodges came with a GND test input of the 803 lodges of the German National Library, a second with an import of [all the shelf marks of the masonic archival compounds preserved in the Prussian Privy State Archive, Berlin. Both created the German focus which one can still see on map representations — a focus on Germany in the borders of 1939. The picture became more international from here on: Bruno Belhoste widened this spectrum into France's early masonic history with his research on late 18th-century Mesmerists, many of whom had been members of contemporary lodges. Information on some 500 Grand Lodges came into the compound from the Wikipedia List of Grand Lodges with additional knowledge about external affiliations. (The list which we can create from this source is still problematic as we were not able to give a clearer picture of the nature of the various affiliations stated here Andreas Önnerfors fed Nils Petter Sundius' Provincial Matrikel över samtliga uti IX. Frimurare Provinsen uti 18de Seculum [...] antagne [...] Ledamöter (c. 1831) into FactGrid: a table of the first 4296 (masonic) biographies of the Swedish Rite, 1735 to 1800. Our data sets of lodges and masons are not homogeneous. Sometimes we will state archival compounds in Berlin and Moscow on a specific lodge. Sometimes, in the case of Swedish masons, we will offer complex masonic careers connected to the various lodges involved. In other cases we have created isolated items without members to name and without more information on the affiliations. Generally one would love to have the information that is required to create the networks of the past and to give the history of the spread and evolution of Freemasonry:
Data modelFirst SearchesThe data sets of all all the lodges on FactGrid can be grabbed with these links of exemplary searches:
The data set of Gotha's lodge gives a pattern of in depth information we can give with more research: But the The Global Genealogy of Lodges would demand a far wider perspective — a perspective which one would match with the genealogy of degrees, rites and systems that developed in this spread. We are here only at the beginning. It would take more than a team to get the bigger picture — it would take a joint venture of lodges and lodge archives to provide the wider picture of the historical network that is here going back into the early 18th century. People involvedBruno Belhoste
Reinhard Markner
Markus Meumann
Martin Mulsow
Claus OberhauserAndreas Önnerfors
Róbert Péter
Helmut Reinalter
Stefan Sarrach
Christine Schaubs
Olaf Simons
Josef Wäges
Christian Wirkner
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