The Birth of Boston is an interactive map of the town as it stood in 1648. Click on any land parcel and you can see who lived there: their name and trade, when they were born and died, their family, and the events that marked their lives. I built it with two historians (then graduate students, now professors), Molly Nebiolo and Matt Bowser, in close partnership with the Massachusetts Historical Society and with funding from Northeastern’s NULab and the Boston Research Center.

The project picks up work that two researchers began a century ago. Samuel Clough, a surveyor, spent decades trying to reconstruct what Boston looked like lot by lot. Annie Haven Thwing compiled an index of some 50,000 people who lived in the town across its first two centuries. Both died with their work unfinished. We are turning what they gathered, along with deeds, genealogies, and town records, into a single map where the social history of early Boston can be seen and searched. The map covers the core of the town now, and the North End is our model for filling in the rest.

As it grows, the map will hold more than parcels and names. We want to add the wells, wharves, churches, and markets that shaped daily life, and to include the histories Clough and Thwing left out, among them Boston’s Indigenous geographies and more of its early African American community. The longer aim is to open the project to the public through walking tours and teaching materials, so that an early Boston most people walk past every day comes back into view.

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