06 April 2017
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Maps can provide all sorts of clues to help family historians trace their ancestors' journeys through life. Discover 3 of our favourite free map websites for genealogy.
Maps can provide all sorts of clues to help family historians trace their ancestors' journeys through life. Discover 3 of our favourite free map websites for genealogy.
As you research deeper and deeper into your family history, you won’t believe how many places our ancestors came from and went to. Just for a start, there’s their birth places, but also the places they lived, schooled, married, worked and died, or those that they emigrated to. Retracing your ancestors’ footprints back in time using maps is a wonderful way of learning more about their lives and times. They can provide all sorts of clues to help you trace your ancestors' journeys through life.
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Try finding an old map of the area your family came from, then compare with a modern map of the area – nowadays Google Earth and Google Maps are really useful for this. You’ll see how villages, towns and cities have developed, spot changes in boundaries, and perhaps in place names too.
Here are our 3 free top map websites to help you on your genealogy journey:
1 A Vision of Britain Through Time
Historic maps for the British Isles from 1805 onwards
2 National Library of Scotland maps
160,000 maps of Scotland, England, Wales & more to explore
Explore more than 400,000 maps from this global-orientated site.
Read June Terrington’s excellent guide to maps for family historians, containing more than 20 useful websites, in the May issue of Family Tree, available here
And you can find our handy guide to using OS maps for family history, here. Happy ancestor-hunting!