Talk:Merian family

Improving the article
Figured I'd leave note of the work I've just done. The artistic branch of the Merian family has several interesting members, so I added a family tree to show their relationships. I also created it to help understand the "older Basel line"/"younger Basel line" descriptions which were initially poor and confusing (the article suggested "younger line is Frankfurt line", which wasn't the case - the Frankfurt artists dynasty is actually a sub-branch of the "younger Basel line"). After that, I translated the German version of the article, as the text there was 10 times better - it described the publishing house's demise and mentioned the Frankfurt line dying out in 1770, as well as having sections on the etymology of the name and the family's naturalisation in Basel. Next I intend to turn the family tree into a template, and then create a second one for the key members of the "older Basel line". I might also add a short para summarising the relevant older line members (mainly aldermen, merchants and bankers) to indicate better their noteworthiness in the history of Basel's development. The English version of the Christoph Merian article also needs improving (the German one seems quite superior), which I might tackle. If anyone wants to translate the (Deutsch) Andreas Merian-Iselin article into English, do go ahead - I think that would make interesting "Basel history" reading too. Pete Hobbs (talk) 16:43, 5 April 2013 (UTC)