Historic maps can be a great addition to your research. Whether your ancestors lived in a city or in a more rural area, maps may depict their geographic area. In honor of Geographic Awareness Week (November 15-21, 2009), this article will offer tips on using maps in your genealogical research.
First you must try to locate a map for the time period in which your ancestor lived:
- If they lived in a city, try the city directory. Many city directories contained street maps, such as the one shown here, from the 1850 Washington, D. C. city directory. Your ancestor’s address should be found in the directory itself; then find the address on the street map. You can find many city directories on microfilm from the Family History Library and at the National Archives and Records Administration, as well as online at Footnote.com.
- Some published county histories contain maps, which may or may not own large landowners. Check public libraries in the area you are researching, and see if they are available through inter-library loan. Some older county histories may also be available online at sites like Google Books or Internet Archive.
- In the mid- to late-nineteenth centuries, many counties published landowner maps, and county atlases, which generally showed the locations of large plantations and the names of their owners. Images of some of these landowner maps have been made available in Ancestry.com’s database, “U.S. County Land Ownership Atlases, c. 1864-1918.” You can also find landowner maps and county atlases on microfiche through the Family History Library.
Knowing the layout of the land, and including a copy of a contemporary map is a great way to add detail to your written family history. There are also several ways in which you can use maps to find clues to your ancestors' lives.
1. Pinpointing their location on a map may help you discern whether they may have lived near a county or state border. In many cases, the courthouse for a neighboring county may have been closer geographically than that for their county of residence. This may have led them to get married in the neighboring county, rather than the one in which they lived.
2. By identifying where your ancestors lived, you may be able to determine which church was closest to them geographically. Church records are often a great resource, especially in the nineteenth century and earlier, when very few states recorded vital statistics like birth and death.
3. In a previous column, we discussed using ‘clusters’ of neighbors in the federal census to identify families. A similar approach using landowner maps can be even more effective. Whereas the federal census can only identify neighbors in the general way that the enumerator visited homes in sequence, it still only constitutes a one-dimensional list of landowners’ names. Maps provide a two-dimensional representation of the landowners in an area. They show neighboring farms in their full context. On the other hand, maps generally do not name non-landowners, though census records do.
4. In antebellum African-American research, maps can often be used to help identify slave owners, who were almost invariably also landowners. For example, if you are able to identify the final slave owner of a female slave and her children, but cannot locate the father of the children, maps may hold the answer you seek. There are many cases where slaves from neighboring plantations married and/or bore children together. In these cases, it may often be possible to identify the mother and the children using the ‘cluster’ approach. However, the father may have been enslaved by another owner. Locate the land owned by the last identified slave owner, and then look around. What other slaveowners lived nearby?
To show this in action, take an example using the map below from Prince George's County, Maryland. At the top of the map excerpt, you will see Mrs. Chas. Bowie (a widow) and at the bottom Dr. F. Sasscer. Other records prove conclusively that a slave of Mrs. Bowie married and had children with a female slave of Dr. Sasscer. Were this fact no known, however, a systematic search of the slaves owned by members of this neighborhood would eventually reveal this connection, taking into consideration that Dr. Sasscer (a) lived near the town, obviously an attraction to many area residents, and (b) was a nearby medical doctor who may have visited Charles Bowie prior to his death. Though they did not live immediately adjacent, a look at the map would reveal all nearby slave owners, and the prudent researcher must follow all leads.
While this column describes only a few, there are also many other uses for maps in your genealogical research. Creative thought, effective analysis, and fact-based conclusions are the most important skills that a genealogist can have. The creative and effective analysis of historic maps can help you break down even the most enduring brickwalls.
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