Maps for family history research

If you’re already well progressed in researching the bare facts of your family history, you might have started delving into background information to flesh out those names in order to learn something about the real people in your family’s past. While there are lots of elements to this, for many people, maps provide a fascinating way of discovering the places where our ancestors lived and worked.

But there’s a lot more to mapping than consulting Google Maps or, if you prefer good old paper maps, poring over an Ordnance Survey Landranger. Here, we investigate the world of mapping with an emphasis on those online resources that will be of most benefit to the family historian. So, whether you hanker over detailed mapping dating back to the 19th century, if you’re interested in historical aerial imagery, or even if you want to discover geological maps, there should be something here to interest you.

For many people, maps provide a fascinating way of discovering the places where our ancestors lived and worked

Modern mapping

Although our main theme is historical mapping resources, to begin with I’ll touch upon contemporary online mapping. For while some websites that provide access to historical mapping allow you to view it alongside more modern mapping, which is a very useful feature, that reference map often