Thankful Villages in England & Wales

Update: six months later this links into a subsequent blog series marked at the bottom,

Ben Maton, aka. @SalisburyOrganist (YouTube), posted a year ago The Musician's GREATEST HORROR among his many story tellings. He merges country walks & parish history in search of organs to play, mostly in SW England near where he lives - the clue is in his YouTube handle LOL - and clickbait title above aside, let me focus on Thankful Villages.

Those villages don't have a memorial to the dead as most places in Europe do - Colonial, WWI & WWII - but a memorial to the living: those are where soldiers came back from WWI (Thankful) or WWII (Doubly Thankful). Ben mentions one @ 6.34 min (here).  I asked Perplexity to compile Thankful Villages, and it had stats for England & Wales - Perplexity conversation, or prompt thread, here - it also helpfully provided a GIS file, as it knew I was into that sort of thing! All the files are stored here, here is the resulting quick map, with full A3 stored here.

click to enlarge

At left you see Thankful Villages in larger amber, & Doubly Thankful in smaller blue. At right, AI also compiled a rough 'pilgrimage route' in straight lines, no actual routing involved. Lastly, AI provided the telling statistic, that 1 in 300 Parishes are Thankful. Full stats in AI thread linked above:

Using the two common denominators:

53 / 16,000 ≈ 0.33% of villages/parishes in England & Wales

53 / 11,500 ≈ 0.46% (if you use the stricter modern civil‑parish count)

Update

This is the tenor of my other blog in general here, and in particular the item on GIS here, which concludes:

A map without reliable footnotes is dangerous; an AI‑assisted historical‑GIS workflow without transparent, accessible sources is worse. Keeping the tiger and the child from circling into butter means insisting that the texts behind our maps remain traceable, citable, and common.

So the data collection was entirely AI, but the map creation was all mine... incl. filling the gaps AI left behind! A data collection protocol is posted at the bottom, gathered by AI as we went along. 

So, in the absence of Story Maps explained here, writing blog posts such as this - indeed the entire blog is devoted to it - is the best way to document GIS properly. Note that this follows an early series on geo-history, last post here. Finally, let me also draw your attention to @SpatialReserves excellent free course on GIS & Society summarized at the bottom of that blog post here.