Gazetteer of the Western Front - 2020 Reboot

[WhiteStarLine]

In 2013 John Reed published his 'Gazetteer of the Western Front', a compendium of over 14,000 locations in France and Flanders.  In 2016 he generously allowed the tMapper Team to use the list.

 

The list consisted of a place name, a latitude and a longitude.  A tiny error in a work of this magnitude saw a few hundred entries culled.  Over the next 4 years, each entry was examined and additional detail added.  For example, the list entry la Motte,50.70256667,3.136466667 eventually became la Motte 36.F.21.a.5.7 Mouvaux, population 13,285 elevation 51 m. District: Lille, Dép. du Nord, Hauts-de-France 50.702403 3.138052 [P 7 2].

 

 

Another 5,000 entries were added by the team, mainly trench names and surveyed points.  Out of these 19,000 entries, a sample of 6,000 have been cross-checked and human-verified on a trench map and modern map and a confidence factor recorded.  Important French / Belgian names were linked so that Ypres found Iepers and Courtrai showed Kortrijk.

 

So what?

 

Today, this endeavour has become the 2020 Reboot of this classic work, hosted on the web and free for all of us to use.  Each successful search elicits a trench map reference and latitude, longitude and these form the database anchor for a researcher wishing to delve deeper, asking to see nearby towns, populations, elevation, Victoria Cross recipients, battles and Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries within a defined range.

 

Gazetteer of the Western Front - 2020 - part of the tMapper Suite

 

Let's try a search for a trench.  Camel Support Trench (we'd not heard of it either) shows how the Gazetteer treats a range of military, farm, district and natural features.  We can enter ame or mel or any part of the name.  We'll type in camel in the top right and press Enter:

 

 

The Gazetteer lists 9 suitable candidates and places an icon to show (in this case) a farm, 6 military-related items, a surveyed point (church steeple) and a natural feature.  Our background illustration shows how we can return to our original search at any time and select a different name, such as Camelia Farm or Camel Valley.  We'll finish by finding out nearby Points of Interest.

 

At the very top-left is a menu option (3 parallel white lines).  Click on this, then on My Conversions, then on Nearby Points of Interest.  Not all of these are well known but you might be able to spot Y Wood.  Hellfire Corner is just over 2,000 metres away.  Hooge, Bellewarde Ridge and Zouave Wood are possibly some familiar names and this facility within the Gazetteer helps to put WW1 references into a familiar context.

 

Next, we look at Vimy Ridge as a good example of a much-visited locality.

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Many Canadians visit Vimy, Maple Copse, Passchendaele and other localities and conduct research.  Using the Gazetteer of the Western Front - 2020 we'll type vimy into the search box.  In our case, we have a mill (built environment), line of trenches, the locality Petit Vimy, the surveyed church spire within Vimy, a natural feature (Vimy Ridge) and a road junction somewhere north in Flanders.

 

 

We'll select Petit Vimy and let the Gazetteer show Victoria Cross recipients, CWGC cemeteries and nearby battles.  The previous post showed the menu system in action.  This time we select Nearby VC Recipients.  The Gazetteer records 15 within 3,750 metres and shows a Wikipedia entry, such as for John Pattison, 50th Battalion CEF at Vimy Ridge in 1917, on page 2.  Currently tMapper cannot hyperlink to this but you can select the Wikipedia URL and right click and a modern browser will let you open the entry in another tab.

 

 

The Gazetteer records that John Pattison and Thain MacDowell survived, but so many did not.  The Gazetteer holds all Commonwealth War Graves for France and Northern Flanders and the same technique (Menu -> Nearby Cemeteries (CWGC)) will show all of them within 4 kilometres.  A sobering 22 memorials and cemeteries lie within a short distance of Vimy Ridge and the closest is only 265 metres away with 94 WW1 graves.  Once again the direct CWGC website is displayed but tMapper version 1.0 will not open the link.

 

 

The same technique is used to find battles, but the Gazetteer deliberately does not document distances as there is no defined centre, the battle could have been fluid and combatants might have deployed over a wide area.  The main point is that the Gazetteer of the Western Front 2020 holds details of Battles (as referenced by Wikipedia):

 

 

To conclude, gaining a list of nearby towns can aid a researcher.  Many a forum poster has written words like "I've found a reference to a soldier.  He was in a trench at M.15.b and I think he might have served near Nieuwpoort."  We'll take a guess and try nieu, or lombard or dune as our term.  Once we have some idea, we can query all towns in the map sheet quadrant.  In our example, dune has elicited Dune Trench and that is in map sheet 12.  The Gazetteer displays the top populated localities so that we can assist narrow down areas to look for candidate locations, then subsequently find those that are in square M.

 

 

 

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Can you assist?  The list of items tagged in the Gazetteer of the Western Front - 2020 as military, such as trenches, redoubts, saps, strong points etc is under 5,000.

 

If you have personally-researched names you are prepared to contribute and cannot find the term with the search engine, the team only needs a name and either a trench reference or a latitude, longitude.  We respect copyright and are not after lists sourced from commercial books, commercial software products etc.

[Chris_Baker]

It's a brilliant piece of work. I can't imagine how many man-hours it represents.