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!