State Power and Transnational Border Patrols 1890-1894 Close up-01.jpg

An example of one of the maps that can be created from the data gathered for A Line of Blood and Dirt

One of the most common reasons we might create a database for historical work is when we want to standardize a lot of information at once. Databases offer us a way to save ourselves a lot of time.

When I was writing the book A Line of Blood and Dirt, I wanted to map the location of the 120,000 administrators I had found who were involved in border control.

I could have typed in the latitude and longitude locations for each person one by one…but yuck.

That would have taken years to do, and I would have made thousands of mistakes/typos as I did it.

Or I had the option of creating a database. By using a relational database, I could type in the latitude and longitude for each location once and let the database attach that information to each person automatically.

This is a great example of a One-to-Many relationship. In my case each unique location could have many administrators working there, but each administrator only had a single location where they were stationed in a given year.

The rest of this module is designed to show you how to create a similar database to save you a bit of time.