Categorization help needed - anticipating the need to have subcategories for Category:Great Wagon Road [closed]

Question

Hi! I have recently finished initial work on a space page to provide an overview/reference point for the Great Wagon Road that ran from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia (heyday in the 1700s). A category for the Wilderness Road (an offshoot of the Great Wagon Road) existed. I created Category: Great Wagon Road to hold pages and profiles related to the Great Wagon Road.

I noted on the space page that subcategories will probably be needed in the future:

... those who traveled the Great Wagon Road... should be listed under Category: Great Wagon Road and/or Category: Wilderness Road, as appropriate (considering how many people traveled the road and its offshoots - 200,000 from 1775 to 1796 through the Cumberland Gap alone - those categories may need to be redefined in the future, with subcategories [by state?] for pioneers and settlers).

However, I just started working on categorizing people associated with the Great Wagon Road (starting with Joshua Evans, who had a tavern on the road) & realized that probably all of the "stationary" people - to include tavern keepers, mapmakers, surveyors, namesakes & explorers - and the pioneers/settlers should probably be categorized separately, with the former included under the Great Wagon Road category and the later categorized to the Great Wagon Road using the migration categorization format, which I've never quite understood well enough to create categories for.

What I'm thinking would be appropriate would be state-level migration categories for the Great Wagon Road... where the person started on the road/an offshoot and where the person left the road/an offshoot. For example, someone who got on the road at a point in Pennsylvania and then settled in Kentucky would be in two Great Wagon Road migration categories - from Pennsylvania and to Kentucky. But I don't know what the specific categories should be named. Would the following be correct? Is replacing "Mirgrants" with "Travelers" OK?

• Category: Great Wagon Road Travelers from Pennsylvania
• Category: Great Wagon Road Travelers to Kentucky
• Category: Great Wagon Road Travelers from Maryland
• Category: Great Wagon Road Travelers to Georgia

Or maybe the noun can be omitted?

• Category: Great Wagon Road, from Pennsylvania
• Category: Great Wagon Road, to Kentucky
• Category: Great Wagon Road, from Maryland
• Category: Great Wagon Road, to Georgia

Or does the migration categorization hierarchy call for only one category per person, such as

• Category: Great Wagon Road, from Maryland to Georgia

The Great Wagon Road runs from Pennsylvania through Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and ends at Georgia. Offshoots took settlers into Tennessee and Kentucky. So we're talking about only eight states but many, many more combinations of those states. I think that two categories per person would be cleaner, but perhaps the multiple combinations would provide a subcategorization structure that won't need further subcategorization and would be most useful in finding ancestors who traveled the Great Wagon Road.

Hmm. I think I've convinced myself that what's needed is the dual state set of subcategories... here's a sampling:

• Category: Great Wagon Road, from Pennsylvania to Maryland
• Category: Great Wagon Road, from Pennsylvania to Virginia
• Category: Great Wagon Road, from Pennsylvania to Tennessee
• Category: Great Wagon Road, from Pennsylvania to South Carolina
• Category: Great Wagon Road, from Maryland to Georgia
• Category: Great Wagon Road, from Virginia to North Carolina
• Category: Great Wagon Road, from North Carolina to Georgia

Would it be ok if I created subcategories based on this last set of examples (from... to...)? If so, let me know & I'll start on that.

Thanks!

Answer 1

One of the keys is remembering that whatever you create needs to be understandable to the average WikiTreer and the category that lands on a profile is the most important part.

Migration categories have not been an easy thing for many WikiTree users, though people who use them regularly have a pretty good grip on how to do it. The rest? I see mistakes in categories all the time.  I like that you include Great Wagon Road in the category names because otherwise, people will use the categories for anyone who moved from one state to the other, which is not something we normally do with migration categories (they are from one country to another.)

Not sure about simply saying "from Pennsylvania to Maryland." Also, stationary people usually have their own location categories and I don't see the purpose of including them in the Great Wagon Road structure. To me, it's like adding a "pit stop" in a migration category.

What we learned in setting up migration categories is that there can be TOO MANY categories when you make it "from one to the other".  (I took basic statistics and I know there's a formula for that, but my class was 40 years ago and I don't recall what it is. LOL) What's wrong with just using the origination OR destination as the category? Seems complicated for such a small project.

Comments

On the mathematics, if anyone is interested, the relationship is quadratic, that is, it goes almost as the square of the number of entities. For example take the 50 US states. There are 50 times 49 or 2,450 (almost 50 squared which is 2,500) ways of migrating from a state to a different state. That would be a lot of categories.

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re: "stationary" - I probably should have thought longer to come up with a more appropriate word. These would be the non-settlers, such as mapmakers Fry and Brooke, ferry operators (necessary for folks on the road) & tavern keepers (ditto). Migration categories would not be appropriate for them but having them in Category: Great Wagon Road would be helpful.

@ Jim - not 50 states, just 8.

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My example was for general US migration as mentioned by Natalie. But 8 * 7 = 56, so the 16 in your later answer is indeed a lot better.

Answer 2

If I understand Nat's post, then the preferred option is two categories per person, which would mean 16 categories. Should they be with commas (as in the following) or without?

1. Category: Great Wagon Road, from Pennsylvania
2. Category: Great Wagon Road, to Pennsylvania 
3. Category: Great Wagon Road, from Maryland
4. Category: Great Wagon Road, to Maryland 
5. Category: Great Wagon Road, from Virginia
6. Category: Great Wagon Road, to Virginia 
7. Category: Great Wagon Road, from North Carolina
8. Category: Great Wagon Road, to North Carolina 
9. Category: Great Wagon Road, from South Carolina
10. Category: Great Wagon Road, to South Carolina 
11. Category: Great Wagon Road, from Georgia
12. Category: Great Wagon Road, to Georgia 
13. Category: Great Wagon Road, from Tennessee
14. Category: Great Wagon Road, to Tennessee 
15. Category: Great Wagon Road, from Kentucky
16. Category: Great Wagon Road, to Kentucky 

Note - In adding the categories, I decided against adding the ones for Tennessee and Kentucky, since they were reached via the Wilderness Road, which already had a category.

Comments

A thought: how many people migrated north along the road? Maybe "to Pennsylvania" and "from Georgia" would be nearly empty.

By the way, Liz, that's a very nice space page.

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Thanks!

I focused on the flow of settlers south and west, since it is most likely these folks that will be of interest to people researching their ancestors. But the road was busy in both directions. From Wikipedia's article on the Great Wagon Road:

The lines of settlers' covered wagons moving south were matched by a line of wagons full of agricultural produce heading north to urban markets; these were interspersed with enormous herds of cattle, hogs, and other livestock being driven north to market.

Some offshoots of the Great Wagon Road were created to connect settlements in order to facilitate settlers getting supplies (the Wikipedia article talks about roads cut by NC's Moravian settlers, but the article does not include the details I'm remembering).

Anyway. You're right that the "from Georgia" category will probably be sparse. I still think it should be created in the interest of a "full set" (same for "to Pennsylvania"). But there are families that moved back to more settled areas from the frontier.

Preachers probably used the entire Great Wagon Road in both directions. Wagoners transporting goods would be going both directions also.

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Ok, thanks for the further background! It sounds a very rich and complex history.

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it really is! I had a crash course this week, doing the research for the space page.

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Jim - I found the details I was thinking of about the Moravians, on Carol's blog:

https://piedmonttrails.com/2022/07/03/great-wagon-road-in-north-carolina-revised-addition/

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Thanks again, Liz. It's great that so much of the story has been discovered and documented.