Jesuit Online Necrology

Mapping the Necrologies

The information pertaining to the births, deaths, and places of entry into the Jesuit order that are available in the Catalogus defunctorum in renata Societate Iesu make it possible for us to spatially visualize and explore the lives of many of these individuals. The following exploratory interactive maps offer a variety of ways to search, filter, and inspect this dataset based on different criteria, offering a different way of engaging with the database and, hopefully, bringing a different perspective to questions that might be asked. Each map is followed by a contextual statement offering a bit more information about its creation and any intrinsic problems related to the dataset used.

• Places Map: The Necrology Catalogues contain more than 22,000 individual locations where Jesuits were born or died. This map allows you to quickly search for Jesuits associated with individual locations or simply see how they were spread across the world.

Possible Question: How many Jesuits in the Necrologies were born in Boston, Massachusetts?

• Provinces Map: This map allows you to quickly visualize the lives of Jesuits who took their vows in specific provinces, vice-provinces, or missions, with the ability to filter by location and by the year of interest.

Possible Question: Where and when were all the Jesuit’s born who took their vows in the province of Californiae (California) in 1845?

• Jesuit Lives Map: This map allows you to search by a Jesuit’s last name and visualize his life by his birthplace, place of entry, and place of death.

Possible Question: What does the life-line of Robertus Turnine look like?

 

Each map was created using LeafletJS and a variety of plugins. See the individual maps and our project praxis page for more details.

Interested in a mapping question involving the Jesuit Online Necrology dataset? Feel free to contact us at jesuitportal@bc.edu.