Happy New Year!

This evening, I finished restoring my GIS of constituencies (Wahlorten). What a hectic two weeks. It would never have been possible if my daughter and son-in-law had time off from work and were able to watch our granddaughter.

I used a combination of Flur and Gemärkung boundaries available for download from the Lower Saxony Geodata Office. These took a little adjusting and I had to be careful when combining two Gemärkungen into one Wahlort.

My next task will be to check for any input mistakes on my part and to verify that all of the constituencies are represented. Then I need to clean up the banks of the Elbe, Weser and Ems, along with the North Sea coast. Time permitting, I will try to recreate the water details that I drew in my original GIS.

Lastly, I need to make sure that all of the polling place cites and town are present, as well as census places in each constituency where voters fond multiple towns vote in one location. This is all a huge relief, preparatory to returning to my spatial analysis of votes cast for the German Democratic Party 1919-1933 as part of my current Theodor Tantzen essay.

Starting over

Working through all of my saved files, the only saved georeferenced shapefiles that i shapefiles have of my constituencies is incomplete. This means that I ahve to recreate EVERYTHING. It took me well north of 500 hours to accurately draw the shapes. I was mapping 1:10,00 scaleso thhat I could accurately get every field annd watercourse. Ths was perrhaps overkiut I wanted to be accuate as possible. Fortunately, as I noted in my article on creating the GIS, by the time that I had finished my work the Niedersachsen had published online a Geodata portal with many useful layers. Their 'Gemeinde" layer did me no good as the villages had passed through several consolidations since my era. They did, however, have layers for "Flur" and "Gemärkung". Using these, I am able to recreate the old constiuencie shapes although with less exactitude (1:50,000). I am maybe 1/4 of the way through. With luck, I will have sufficient time over spring breeak to comolete the task. I need it so that I can start analyzing Left Liberal voting patters.

QGIS solution

A week away, and works! Now to get to the spatial analysis! A preliminary look and things might not be quite what I expected, with the German Democrats early on doing less well in livestock areas than I had imagined.