Charting the Loyalist Migrations: Digital Public History, Shared Authority, and Descendant Communities (original) (raw)

The American Revolution, (1775-1783), was a civil war that divided communities and displaced thousands of people in North America. Perhaps 60 000 people left the United States in the conflict's aftermath to settle in what is today Canada, the Caribbean, and in other parts of the British Empire. 1 Loyalist Migrations, (loyalistmigrations.ca), is a spatial history project that uses ArcGIS to trace these journeys. 2 It is also an experiment in collaborative public history research. The project, now in its initial phase, is a partnership between the Huron Community History Centre, the Map and Data Centre at Western Libraries, and the United Empire Loyalist Association of Canada (UELAC). The UELAC has generously provided funding for two student researchers at Huron University College and has shared their Loyalist Directory as an initial dataset for the project. Loyalist Migrations has multiple goals. We are drawing upon a variety of archival, scholarly, and genealogical sources, to visualize the scope and diversity of the migrations for public audiences and, in the years to come, we will provide new research and analysis based on this data. We also hope to demonstrate ways in which university-based historians can cooperate with genealogists and family history-keepers to share in the production of history.