How To Use Historical Maps To Better Bring Your Family Stories To Life
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When we start researching our genealogy, we often focus on gathering as many names and records as possible.
But our ancestors were more than names on a tree. To understand them, we must understand the place they lived in.
Indeed, geography is one of the most important facets of family history!
One valuable resource for helping genealogists is historical maps.
They enable us to visualize the community in which our ancestors lived. Not only can we pinpoint the exact places where our ancestors lived or worked, but we can also see the locations of who and what they interacted with.
They also make it easier to explain and understand where events occurred. This can make family history more shareable and interesting to relatives who are less into family history than we are.
In this article, you’ll learn how to use historical maps to tell your family history stories, as well as specific types of maps to look for.
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How to use historical maps to tell your family history
Maps are one of the most important resources for comprehending how our ancestors lived. They can aid us in picturing their community in a way other records can’t.
Censuses tell us their neighbors’ names and city directories tell us what businesses existed, but maps show us where everything was in relation to where our family lived. They give us a sense of the history of a town at the time your ancestors resided there and add context and intriguing aspects to your family history.
Here are 6 ways to employ older maps to tell your family history stories:
1) Their migration tale
Historical maps enable you to trace your ancestors’ movements from country to country, state to state, or within the same city or county.
They can show what connections to other points your ancestors may have on their migration path. People didn’t always migrate in one fell swoop. They may have made several stops along the way, leaving records behind for you to discover.
They also reveal what transportation resources they had access to.
You can see your ancestors’ locations and how they expanded in or left an area. Although they may have all started living in the same town, you can trace how over generations they spread out throughout a region or left.
2) What changes they experienced over time
Vintage maps can tell you about county boundaries and if they merged or broke into other counties. This will inform you where records about your ancestors may be hiding.
How did the vicinity grow and change over time? For example, did they go from being the only person on their road to a developed neighborhood?
Did street names and building numbers change or disappear? The street where my great-grandmother lived in Honolulu no longer exists, but I found it on a vintage city map. In some cases, regions affected by war or other disasters may have revised their streets and house numbers when rebuilding.
Because they capture a moment in time, maps can identify what venues or landmarks no longer exist from when your family lived there, like schools or cemeteries. This can make it easier to discover things like burial sites that may not be on modern maps or sites like Find A Grave.
If there were major changes like disappearing factories or railroads, you can picture how it may have affected your family. Similarly, you can trace what new schools, religious institutions, or job opportunities came into the area that may have improved their lives.
3) What was available in their community
By knowing what was in their community, we can get a better sense of their lives and what challenges or benefits they may have experienced.
Old historical maps can indicate what businesses and institutions were around at the time, like markets, banks, and hospitals. They can also establish what educational and job opportunities your ancestors had access to.
You can turn to maps to see how far these important resources were from where your family lived, such as how far they had to travel to go to church. Did they have options in town and how were they from where they lived?
Several branches of my relatives lived in towns without a Catholic church and had to go up to 12 miles to another town for religious services.
Likewise, they can point you toward possible burial sites by locating what cemeteries existed.
Maps often include transportation options in the area. This can give you clues about whether they had easier access to travel for personal or work-related tasks. You can even find transportation-specific ones, like vintage railroad maps.
If other records mention specific people or spots, maps can be of use to locate them.
4) Who was in the community
Make use of maps to uncover who your ancestors’ neighbors were, whether they were in the same building or neighborhood. What can you learn about the neighbors that can paint a picture of the broader community?
Who else lived in the same general locality? Maps can assist you in tracing the migration of different groups into the area. Did people of different ethnicities and religions live in areas clustered together? Imagine how your ancestors might have felt about the changing population.
They are also useful for identifying how many people of the same name lived in the area, who you can then research to see if they are relatives.
You can also determine where known and possible relatives lived and look for patterns on how close they lived to each other and if they migrated between communities together.
5) Who is missing from the map
Just as important as who or what was included is who was missing, especially if your ancestors were left out. Maps can reflect biases of the time and omit marginalized people like Native Americans or other ethnic groups.
Maps can also reflect legal factors, like who could own land, such as women and Black men.
Women may appear as landowners, but with little information, like "Mrs. Spooner." They can also be hiding in plain sight. My 3rd great-grand uncle’s wife, Lorinda Elizabeth Amey (Rice) Merrill, was on an old county map as “LEA Merrill.”
6) What their physical environment was like
Maps can tell you what the geographic area was like and what may have affected where people settled, like forests or mountains.
You can see how their physical surroundings impacted what they could do for work. You can get an idea of how easy or hard it could have been for them to go to school or into town to buy supplies. If there were nearby hills or rivers, it may have been difficult to travel, influencing them to go to other towns or counties to do things like attend church or run errands.
They can also allow you to pinpoint where someone lived. A deed for my 3rd great-grandfather says he bought a house on the highway leading to Blake Hill. By cross-referencing a landowner map with a topographic map, I was able to connect where his property was.
And of course, they can tell you how far apart localities were from one another. My 3rd great-grandmother lived in Hartford, Vermont, and married in Lebanon, New Hampshire. For a long time (too long), I wondered how people from two states met in the 1830s. Looking at a map, I saw that Hartford and Lebanon are right across the Connecticut River from each other and a bridge connected the two towns.
Maps can illustrate how long it would take for people to go from one spot to another based on the transportation options they had. Distances affected who they could woo as a potential spouse or where they could sell their goods.
They can also give you a sense of what the environment may have felt like, such as the sounds and smells. If they lived near railroads, factories, or wooden streets, what might it have sounded like? Or perhaps they lived near a lot of farms with livestock. The smells might have been … interesting, to put it delicately. If they lived on a hill, they might have had an amazing view of the area.
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Types of maps to use for genealogy
There are several types of historical maps you can take advantage of to tell the story of your forebears. To best leverage maps to tell stories, try to seek out several kinds to gather different perspectives.
While a wider variety exists for urban areas, there are still options for more rural ancestors.
Landowner maps. Landowner maps are one of my favorites. As the name suggests, they show the residences of landowners. These are great for seeing your ancestors’ neighbors, and how far they lived from markets, churches, and other key factors in their life. They can also highlight topographical features like forests and hills, giving you a sense of their environment.
Close up of Culpepper County, Virginia landowner map
Historical atlases. These reflect features like landowner names, geographic traits, railroads, and cemeteries. They can also have biographies of residents, histories of the county and its towns, and illustrations of important buildings, giving you other perspectives into the region and time.
Old city maps. City or town maps can be very detailed and have street names, means of transportation, and prominent businesses.
Fire insurance maps. Sanborn maps are the most well-known of these. Fire insurance maps are more often available for larger cities and towns. These are beneficial as they have street names and include all the properties in a specific area, including what the structures were made of.
Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Hazleton, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania
Historical county maps. These give the county boundaries, as well as the town boundaries within it, They also record features like roads and rivers, churches, schools, and cemeteries. They often include landowners and can highlight local businesses.
Migration-related maps. Charts depicting canal, railroad, and wagon routes can tell you how people traveled from one location to another and where they may have stopped in between.
Map of wagon routes in Utah Territory
Rural route maps. Post office routes can be handy for those with families that lived in non-urban areas. These can also specify landowners, as well as where houses, schools, roads, and churches were within rural areas.
Topographic maps. Topographical charts are great for getting an idea of their environment, both the advantages and the obstacles. You can see features like mountains, forests, and rivers, plus highways and roads. You can get a sense of migration trails and why people chose to settle in a certain locale. They’re also helpful for calculating distances between sites.
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Next steps you can take
To complement your map research, a few next steps you can take are:
1) Research books about the time period and/or place to get more perspective on what life was like then. These could be anything from county history books to historical fiction or biographies. Connect any people or sites you learn about maps and your family history when possible.
2) Find photos of the locality. There are lots of resources out there for historical photos and postcards, like Flickr, Digital Public Library of America, Online Archive of California, and the New York Public Library.
3) Bring maps with you when you interview relatives about their family history stories. Seeing them can benefit the conversation by sparking their memories.
4) Look to old maps to lead you to more records. As I mentioned earlier, you can see what institutions existed in their community and seek out their records. If boundaries changed, you could deduce where the records may be today.
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Final thoughts
Historical maps breathe life into our ancestors' stories, allowing us to see the unique traits of their communities and how they interacted with others within them.
Through maps, we can visualize the physical and social landscapes they navigated, connecting names on a pedigree chart with the lives they led.
Leveraging maps allows us to better tell the stories of our ancestors and understand the landscapes that shaped their lives.