Michael Conrad
Summer Honors Project in Religion
“Religious Mapping of Chowan County, North Carolina” 

This project consisted of entirely original research in the field of history and religion. Over the duration of the project, I visited every church or spiritual house of worship in Chowan Country, North Carolina, and I will collect GPS coordinates, a digital photograph of the actual building, and other historical data. All information was compiled in a Microsoft Access Database which was exported to Arc View GIS. This program mapped all of the coordinates with smart tags containing all of the fields from the original database. The final product of map shows patterns of denominational distribution, centers of population, and other sociological data within a visual historical construct. This knowledge will be an invaluable resource to the local community. As far as I know, after working in the churches in the area, no project of this scope has ever been attempted.