The process of laying out the memoir of Esther Latrobe on a map gave me not only the opportunity to learn more about her, but also to see the physical course of her life as a whole. Esther’s memoir primarily focuses on the prayer she cared so deeply about as well as the illnesses she endured throughout her life. She relocates at three points in her life, from Bristol to Gracehill to Tytherton, and finally, to Ayr. While she never mentions her form or experience of travel, the locations in which she lives are significantly far away from each other, and, at the time, the travels between those places would have taken days. Before creating my storymap, I never wondered why she chose not to write at all about her travels. However, after seeing the intensity that the travels would have had, I had to call into question its effects on her life. Being that she was a person who periodically became ill, it is likely that the close quarters and unsanitary conditions of travel took a toll on Latrobe and her body. That is why it is so enigmatic that she would have no mention of such travels in her memoir. Without the process of creating a storymap, however, I would never have thought to ask such a question. The storymap process also helped me to break down Latrobe’s life in a different way. It helped me to think of Latrobe’s life in terms of geography rather than timeframe and break up some major events in her life. I chose to attribute more than one slide to the places where major life events occurred due to the low number of relocations in Latrobe’s memoir versus the rest of the Moravian memoirs. Ayr was clearly the most significant place in Latrobe’s life; it is where she lived with her husband for the majority of their marriage, had her son, and eventually died. However, according to Latrobe, Tytherton meant more than any other place to her due to the establishment of her close connection to God there. Overall, the mapping process gave me a new perception of Latrobe’s life and her travels and allowed me to think more deeply about her actual writing and why she chose to write about what she did. As Bodenhamer says in his article, the act of placing a sequence of events on a map means visualizing time and space in the context of one person’s life, and it acts as a guide to that life and its relation to the world in its time.
StoryMap: [iframe src=”https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/4703e74bdaa1d34536ae08a785be92cc/latrobe-storymap/index.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”100%” height=”800″][/iframe]
