Mapping Ancestral Lands

Welcome back, genohistorians. I hope you got a good sense of what I mean by “genohistory” in the introduction I posted two weeks ago. This week, as we start this genohistorical journey together, let’s get our heads around something important. Something huge. Ready for it? Here goes. We are preparing for time travel.

Time travel! The closest humans can get to that, anyway . . . yet. And being smart and savvy travelers, we plan to do it right. Thanks to genealogical research, we have a good idea of when and where we might meet the ancestor of choice. Before we hit the road to this unfamiliar place, though, we need to get a visual sense of our ancestral lands. We need maps! And if you’re a born genohistorian, you LOVE that idea.

Why Ancestral Land Mapping Comes First

Maps of our ancestor’s world give us our bearings, historically, genealogically, geographically. For knowledge to stick in my Teflon brain, I need a “visual” — a structure to hold it. I start virtually all research with maps and consult them all along the way.

Maps generate and answer questions. They do more to bring the ancestral world to life than just about any document we can study. They illustrate the layers of passing time, growth, and maybe decline. Most magical of all, when you finally make a trip and stand on the land you have imagined in maps, you are acutely aware that your history happened here. Your family had some version of this very same view.

Maps are nothing new to genealogists or historians, I realize. The thorough genealogist tries to pinpoint the location and movement of ancestors. The historian uses maps to understand and illustrate the past events or places being interpreted.

The genohistorian’s relationship with maps encompasses both. But it goes deeper and more personal in perspective than history and wider in scope than genealogy. We are not just documenting our ancestor’s location, but fleshing out the world as they saw and experienced it.  We want to know where they lived and who lived along the same road. Where was their church? What roads did they take to get to town, and where and how did they cross the river? When, where, and why did they move? How close were they to the events deemed “historical” by their descendants?

Every question we ponder adds rich, colorful brushstrokes to our painting of long-ago, fascinating lives. Curiosity inspires us to map ancestral lands.

Getting Started: The Curiosity System

Many of you are genohistorians by nature and started this process long before we had a name for our kind. Maybe you follow your curiosity, as I tend to do. Curiosity, while seemingly haphazard, is a learning system I highly recommend.

But “curiosity killed the cat,” some will protest. If you know a cat, however, you know why I reject that dismal idea. Curiosity keeps my cats thoroughly alive and always investigating. The first day the two timid orphaned kittens from our back woods finally convinced my husband and me — confirmed “dog people” — to let them push through the back door into our kitchen, I saw how they work. They walked tightly against the walls, taking in the perimeter, room by room, smelling as they went. We called this their “perimeter search,” and they did it frequently in the early days.

When they had their bearings, they investigated pillows, furniture, shoes, and eventually, us. Now, eight years later, they sleep on top of us, entitled victors over their conquered domain. Skitz and Bootz Baker still excitedly investigate every new smell that enters their house or circles near their luxury “catio.” Curiosity continually expands their world.

I have found that curiosity is the best motivator and sealant for my own research. If a question is tapping on my brain, I will keep hunting until I have the answer. I would guess that at least 80% of the nonfiction books I’ve purchased in my life were in order to answer a driving question. And most of those books were never finished. I read until the question was answered — just about the time another Amazon package arrived at the door with the answer to my newest question. Whenever I learn this way, the learning sticks. While it appears haphazard from the outside, it is being ordered at a place inside my gray matter. And when I find the answer, my gray matter has already created a receptive place for the new knowledge to lodge and grow.

So if you are just getting started in your quest, ask yourself this: What do I want to know about my ancestor’s world? Then, start sniffing the perimeter.

Sniffing Perimeters of Ancestral Lands

Somewhere along the way in your time travel, and probably very early in the journey, you will find yourself curious about the perimeters of your ancestor’s world. We are almost as smart as cats, after all. We feel discombobulated if we don’t know where we are in the larger scheme of things.

I recommend you begin your perimeter search with a map of your ancestor’s town or crossroads as it is today, perhaps using Google Maps. This lets you see the topography of the area. You can see where the land ripples and get a mental snapshot of the roads, rivers, and lakes, as they are now. Make note of the surrounding communities, the closest towns, getting a feel for the current context of your area of study.

Now, you are ready to time travel. Find a map of the same area at the time your ancestors first arrived. Let the differences in the two maps begin to shape questions in your mind about what took this world from point A to point B. Has the locality grown, or has it disappeared? Has a river turned into a lake . . . or a ditch?

Then find more maps, moving forward through time and looking closely at any details they offer. You will see the transformation with more nuance. How did the changes in landscape affect your ancestors? As curiosity begins to nudge, let it flow.

How do we capture ancestral map research?

You are about to gather a wealth of information. And I don’t want to scare you, friends, but you are probably going to need to become a bit of a mapmaker. You will be finding clues as to your ancestral lands in many scattered places. You will soon be the expert on the world as it looked to your specific ancestors. For most ancestors, it only takes a tiny bit of research to go where no descendant has gone before. And that’s where the fun is. Being the first real discoverer.

The time travel map you need — the one that looks outward from your ancestor’s home to the world they knew — probably does not exist yet. You will need to create it. It will be rough, if you are not a trained cartographer. But it will be a vital document to you from now on, and a gold mine to every curious descendant who follows your trail. (To be honest, it will eventually be a series of maps, but let’s keep it simple for the moment.)

Mapping Your Ancestor’s World

If you don’t already have a mapping method of choice, let’s try something basic.

1. Go to Google Maps and find the locale, as it is today. If it is a large urban area, however, you might want to zero in on the area of town where your ancestors lived, if you know it.
2. Grab a screenshot of the map.
3. Choose a tool like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint and paste the screenshot into a document. (You might need to tell your software to let the graphic sit in the background, where you can place things on top of it. In Word, you right-click on the image, choose “Wrap Text,” and then “Behind Text.”) Save the document where you can find it again.
4. See if your software allows you to make the image more transparent or brighten it, so it can become your subtle background guide to the ancestor map you’re going to create on top of it. (In Word, use Format—Corrections.)
5. Start mapping by locating landmarks on today’s map that were in existence when your ancestor was there. Perhaps some homes, churches, or a courthouse. A crossroad or river branch. Mark them on your map. (In Word, use the Insert Text Box or Insert Shapes options.) As you go back in time, these will be your anchors to the true geography, even as the earlier maps become less accurate.
6. Then, over time, you will add marks for other elements — roads, bridges, buildings, historic event sites — as you figure out where things used to be. You’ll find them in earlier maps, but you might also find documents that say, “His house was down Market Street by the river.” Word maps. From Google Earth, you can make out scars on the landscape where roads used to be or the remnants of a bridge. Grab the clues.
7. Use colors, shapes, numbers, letters to create a meaningful code for yourself, as the map grows. Maybe a square marks a location you are certain of, and a circle is speculative. Or blue for certainty, green for speculation. Use numbers or codes to identify things, to keep labels from becoming unreadable. Keep a legend of your codes.
8. I recommend that you use Zotero to hold your research about each landmark and map element, the map itself, and your legend. See the Zotero Notes below for some tips.
9. Finally, dig in for the long haul. Your ancestral land map is a living, changeable document. Don’t worry about getting every mark perfect. Here’s a rough start of one in my ancestral homeland of Centreville, Alabama:

Where do we go from here?

Keep refining your knowledge of your ancestral landscape. It is truly one of the most important things any of us can do to create a foundation for meaningful research.

The next Genohistory on Purpose blog post is due to appear June 6 and will be examining what can be learned about the community in general and your ancestors in particular by examining the inhabitants around them. Using an example of my own family in Bibb County, Alabama, I will also explain some of the elements I mapped above.

Please use the comment space below to tell us about where you have found great maps or how you create your own. If you have not signed up for the Genohistory newsletter, join below and get news, offers, and discounts.

Mapping Ancestral Lands in Zotero

In Zotero, you can collect research associated with your ancestral land maps. I have a master folder (collection) labeled “PLACES.” My research is primarily in the U.S., so that is the assumption in my organization. Within PLACES, I have folders for any states I am researching. Inside those, I have counties. The county folders contain towns when the source is that specific. I store materials about a specific institution or place — a church, school, hotel — within a town or county in the locality’s folder.

To create a quick and basic map legend for the map of Centreville above, I created a freestanding note in the Centreville folder called “_General Map Legend.” (I start it with an underscore to make sure it always stays near the top of all sources.) In the note, I created an item for elements in the map, using numbers. The legend, the numbering system, all of it, can get more sophisticated as the map grows more complex or becomes multiple maps.