52 Ancestors Challenge - Week 6 - Maps

 

Maps are fascinating and can be used to enhance the family story by looking at the wider location of your family.  Did your ancestor live in a village or a town?  When they lived there was there a transport network like a railway or regular coaches which could have taken them further afield.   In England, did they live near to a main travel route, such as the Great North Road, the Icknield Way or within a day’s travel of larger towns from which they could travel to different parts of the country. For example, how easy would it have been to travel from Dorset to London and Suffolk to London, as my Great Grandparents did?

Looking at my family in Hertfordshire, my main town of interest is Hitchin, but I have relatives who lived in other towns and villages which were within walking distance on a market day, such as Willian, Baldock, Norton, St Ippollitts and Kings Walden.  Slightly further afield we also find family in Stevenage (before the new town was built), Wheathampstead and Redbourn, still not too far away if you managed to hitch a lift on a cart.

With my London relations, maps have been useful in working out where the members of the family lived in relationship to each other to work out possible churches where baptism and marriage could have taken place.

Maps are tactile.  Poring over an old map if your locality you can visually see the changes in housing, roads, and development.

There are now several good websites where you can see the development of localities by comparing maps of different dates.

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/

https://maps.nls.uk/os/6inch-england-and-wales/

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/about/history/historical-map-archives

But, although these are very useful, there is nothing like an actual map.   These can be in various formats – a flat sheet, folded, in an atlas or a smaller book. 

For family history, the older the better. One very useful book for family historians in the UK is the Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers.  This book is useful for working out which parishes your ancestor may have lived in, apart from the ones where you have already found their baptisms, marriages, and burials.  Plotting possible ways of travel can be helpful.  Tithe, Estate and Enclosure maps are especially useful. 

Ordnance Survey maps, in various scales, can be picked up at flea markets, charity shops, bookshops and via online auction sites such as Ebay.  The larger scale older maps are useful for finding specific named farms, houses, and fields.

One of my favourite books, which I inherited from my cousin, who found it at an antique fair, is Bartholomew’s Handy Reference Atlas of London & Suburbs which she paid the princely sum of £2 for. 

The 4^th edition is dated 1921, and has coloured maps, a useful index of streets, population figures and plans, railways, and postal districts.   So useful at this date with the 1921 Census just being released, and before much was bombed in the second world war.