Ancestry Magazine

Places aren’t everything in family history research, but frequently they seem to come very close. With newly available digital capabilities, we can now search globally for a person’s name across a multitude of data bases. Still, that hasn’t reduced the significance of place or location as a key element in our searches, and it’s difficult to get very far in tracing our ancestors without knowing where they lived or died.

Some ways you can use places and locations in your research include 1) positively identifying individuals with the same or similar names, 2) finding records and record collections for further searching, and 3) organizing future research into related blocks of work based on particular localities and periods of time.

Positive Identification
Most of us learn early on—sometimes from a humbling experience—that a particular name doesn’t always identify a particular individual; many individuals may have the same name or a similar name. We need something further to give us confidence that the name we have found refers to the person for whom we are searching. Without that sense of confidence, at best we’ll have to attach a qualifier like “perhaps” or “probably” to whatever we say about our own people of interest based on records that can’t be positively linked with them. Unfortunately, those qualifying terms are frequently omitted or overlooked when the information is entered into a digital database, either on our own computer or online.

When we find the same name and age listed in several records from the same locality, other places mentioned may be the key to telling whether the records are about the same person, and whether that’s the individual of interest to us. Those other localities may include birthplaces, other residences, places of marriage, birthplaces of children, and places of death or burial.

In recent years, unique identifiers like fingerprints, social security numbers, and DNA profiles have come into use to positively identify individuals. But these resources are available to family historians only on a very limited basis, so place is still an important factor in telling individuals apart, along with the names of their spouses and children, and dates of events associated with them. These are the items most often available to positively identify individuals who lived before the last half of the twentieth century.

Finding Records
Recently a genealogist friend reminded me of a bit of advice I had passed on when she was just starting her family research: “When you’re using the Family History Library Catalog, it’s in the Locality Section where your searches are most likely to be rewarded and turn up unexpected treasures.” She still passes this advice on to beginners in the classes she teaches. When I offered this advice originally, the catalog was available only at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City or on microfiche at local Family History Centers affiliated with it. Now, of course, the catalog is also available online at www.familysearch.org and on CD-ROM disks for individual use. I still find its locality arrangement, accessible through the “Place Search” option on the Family History Library Catalog search page, the most likely method to bring up sources for extending difficult ancestral lines.

The approach for finding records in the catalog is similar to the way researchers had to work before the Family History Library and its network of Family History Centers became such a major resource or before the wealth of information became available on the Web. When we found a new locality with which our family had some association, we would try to find what r ecords were available, either in the repositories that held the originals, or in manuscripts, published transcription, or abstracts that might be available in libraries. Then, if we didn’t have access to a library that held a copy of the information, or we couldn’t visit the area in person, we attempted to obtain copies by mail or engaged a records searcher in the area to find and retrieve the information for us.

It’s mind-boggling to consider what we can do now from home through online subscription services. Only a few years ago, extensively searching census schedules or immigration passenger lists required an all-day trip to a National Archives branch or a major genealogical library—and the lack of indexes for some holdings made searches impractical unless precise dates or locations were known. If the subscription cost seems high for the newly-available online indexes and document images, compare that with the cost of parking in one of the major cities where there’s a full collection of National Archives census and passenger list microfilms!

By focusing research on a locality, we can identify records that may include families of interest. However, individual names from most of the records will never be extracted or placed in an online index, in spite of the efforts of thousands of dedicated volunteers and the paid indexers hired by the online subscription services. Knowing that some records have not been transcribed or microfilmed, we can then make whatever arrangements are necessary to search for them and obtain our own copies—but it can’t be done yet on the Web.

Planning and Organizing Research
Records are created chronologically at a particular location, so the originals that survive are us ually arranged by date, and the collection is identified with its place of origin (if it is not at the original location).

If we group our search objectives by locality and time period, even when they are for different families or family lines, we can greatly improve our efficiency. Grouping place-related research means we will not have to revisit the same indexes, finding aids, and resources each time we find another family line that has connections to that area.

After a locality has been selected, dividing our future work further into time periods has the added advantage of bringing together searches in the records for that period, so they won’t need to be searched again for another family. Also, particular periods of time may require their own search strategies. For example, we would focus on land and probate records in the years before vital registration and church registers came into widespread use or before the U.S. Census began every-name listings in 1850.

A Sense of Place
A place is not an abstract concept. It’s a specific location on the earth’s surface, with natural and man-made features that change over time and that exists in relation to other places near or far. Much of the information we gather about places can be fully understood only when we know something of the area itself and the places nearby.

Maps are indispensable tools for understanding the places where our research leads us. Large-scale topographic maps—ones on which small details like individual buildings, as well as larger features like hills and valleys, are shown—are best for this purpose. Current maps of this type, published by the U.S. Geological Sur vey of the Department of the Interior, cover most of the United States at a scale of 1:24,000, or 1 inch equal to 2,000 feet, and they can be viewed online at www.topozone.com. They are often called quadrangle maps, or just “quads,” because each covers a four-sided area that is 7 1/2 minutes of latitude and longitude in length and width.

For genealogical research, however, we need maps for the time period that we’re researching, so we can see the area as our ancestors knew it. For rural areas, beginning in the mid-1800s, county atlases were published for many localities and include names of landowners. For cities, the Sanborn Company began publishing fire insurance maps in 1867. At a scale of 1 inch to 50 feet, they show not only the footprint or plan of individual buildings, but also their height and construction materials. Older large-scale maps are less likely to be available online and, when they are, only as part of a subscription service. For example, the Sanborn maps at http://sanborn.umi.com are available through libraries with a ProQuest subscription, or by purchase from the current publisher of Sanborn maps, Environmental Data Resources, Inc. www.edrnet.com, which also sells copies of old editions of USGS topographic maps.

Less costly sources for maps of this type are major genealogical libraries, historical societies, and university and large public libraries in the area. While their collections of older county atlases, fire insurance maps, and USGS quadrangles may be limited to their own areas, you’ll usually be able to consult original paper editions.

We can learn more about a place or location through land platting: we plot on paper the boundaries of adjoining properties using d escriptions in old deeds. (These deeds frequently give the name of each adjacent property owner.) This information can often be correlated with families named on census schedules and helps us understand how long families lived close to each other and perhaps intermarried.

Platting is a hands-on skill that is best learned using pencil, protractor, and ruler or scale. Individual assistance is available at the land platting workshops being offered at regional and national conferences. Some recent ones have had costs underwritten by the Board for Certification of Genealogists Education Fund, a charitable trust supported by donations from the genealogical community. Once the land-platting process is understood, commercially available software programs can greatly simplify the production of graphic plans from boundary descriptions.

After you’ve become familiar with a place, studied old maps, and gotten a feel for neighboring towns and regions, take another look at all the locations named in your family source documents—you may find new significance in obscure references that didn’t seem to apply to your own family the first time around.

Donn Devine, CG SM, CGI SM, a genealogical consultant from Wilmington, Delaware, is an attorney for the city and archivist of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington. He is a former National Genealogical Society board member, currently chairs its Standards Committee, and is a trustee of the Board for Certification of Genealogists®.