FactGrid:The Global Genealogy of Lodges

Masonic chart, 1847

More than 2000 data sets to cope with

Sources we incorporated — so far a predominantly German picture

• Map view / tinyurl

FactGrid is most certainly the best resource on the Illuminati — the secret "Order" founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776. With the data which we could bring together form different research projects we received information about a 100 late-18th-century lodges of the German speaking territories. This is not surprising — Weishaupt's Anti-Rosicrucian secret Order had, after all, transformed itself in the late 1770s into a Masonic high-grade system in order to infiltrate lodges and with them Masonic networks.

A second wave of lodges came into the FactGrid with the first GND test input: 803 in total, again mostly of the former German speaking territories. Our present map gives the picture with the shadow of history: The former German territories in modern Poland had complex Masonic network. Most of the information on our Data records is GND information designed to merely identify lodges. Research will ask questions like:

• Who granted the patents? (How did Freemasonry spread on the global map?)
• How and when did these lodges change affiliations to Grand Lodges and parent organisations?
• Which systems and rites did they adopt and adhere to?
• Who were the members?
• Who filled leading positions?
• Where did these lodges reside?
• What histories of naming did they write?
• Where can we still find archival records?
• What has been published about these lodges?

For some 600 Lodges we can give the links to the former archives now lodged in the Prussian Privy State Archives, Berlin. Information on some 500 Grand Lodges came into the compound from the Wikipedia List of Grand Lodges with additional knowledge about external affiliations. All these data can be edited by anyone with an account.

First Searches

The data sets of all all the lodges on FactGrid can be grabbed with these links:

• All the Lodges on FactGrid
• all lodges, by place of resident with information about founding date, constitution and mother lodge
• All Grand Lodges on FactGrid
• all Grand Lodges and how they are organised by chosing umbrella organisations: net work graph

The data set of Gotha's lodge gives a pattern of in depth information we can give with more research:

• Lodge 'Ernst zum Compaß', Gotha

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 involved

Josef Wages

=== Christian Wirkner

Data language

• All FactGrid properties of specific Masonic interest

Links

• FactGrid search: All Lodges by date of establishment
• 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.

• Logenbestände im Sonderarchiv Moskau
• Carl Broecker: Die Freimaurerlogen Deutschlands von 1737 bis einschliesslich 1893, Mittler, Berlin 1894.

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Wikidata folgt Wikipedia. Und dort haben Vereine eine schweren Stand, Logenhäuser als Denkmale gehen eher: Wiki likes Monuments. Die Verbindung läuft also oft über die Liegenschaft (Eigentum, Anschrift), siehe https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8610826 --Martin Gollasch (talk) 09:47, 30 August 2019 (CEST)