How to find your ancestors using online maps

Adult Continuing Education Irish Genealogy Summer School 2015 - Ancestral Connections: Names, Places and Spaces

12:00 noon Tuesday 30 June 2015

G01 Western Gateway Building

by Dr Paddy Waldron

WWW version:

http://pwaldron.info/ACE/

Background

The Ordnance Survey Office was established in 1824.
The original survey of the entire island of Ireland at a scale of 6 inches to 1 mile was completed 22 years later, in 1846.
Ireland became the first country in the world to be entirely mapped at such a detailed scale.
More details can be found on the OSi website and a full history in JH Andrews' A Paper Landscape, repr. Four Courts Press, 2006.
Since about 2010, the OSi's historic maps of Ireland have been available online at maps.osi.ie.

John Grenham wrote recently (Glory be to the Ordnance Survey, Irish Times, 8 June 2015) about what happened when "the Ordnance Survey Ireland maps website (maps.osi.ie) was taken offline and the worldwide Fraternity of Historic Map Nuts held its breath."

The official boundaries and spellings of townlands have largely remained fixed since the survey of 1824-46, with one or two minor exceptions, e.g. Ballybrown and Moyarta.

Google Maps have strange polygons in place of the true townland boundaries; these go away when one closes the search box.

As (a) spellings of personal names in official records are far more fluid than spellings of townland names in official records and (b) there may be more than one person with the same name living in nearby townlands, it is advisable to find the townland first and then look for the person.

Taken almost two centuries earlier, in 1656-1658, the Down Survey of Ireland was the first ever detailed land survey on a national scale anywhere in the world, e.g Barony of Moyfarto (now spelled Moyarta).
(Note that Moyarta East and Moyarta West are two townlands in the Barony of Moyarta. Moyarta East and Moveen West were separated in the Down Survey by the Lisheen River; the part of the 17th century Moyarta East adjoining the Lisheen River is now the separate townland of Breaghva.)
The 17th century Down Survey maps, 19th century Ordnance Survey maps and 21st century Google maps have been overlaid on each other, e.g. Kilkee.

The Tithe Applotment Books generally pre-date the Ordnance Survey, so that they often use non-standardised townland boundaries and spellings.
There are no matching maps and poor handwriting has also resulted in many transcription errors.
For example, Moyarta East appears to still include Breaghva and there are further differences between the transcriptions by the National Archives and by Clare County Library.

The good news is that finding your ancestral home on maps becomes much easier from 1846 on.

A Step-by-Step Approach

For rural locations, identify the relevant townland:
- You may already know the townland from family tradition or be able to establish it from records of emigrants from Ireland preserved in their destination countries (tombstone inscriptions, obituaries, etc.).
- Many emigrants to Australia, and elsewhere, called their houses after their native townland.
- To confirm the townland name, search for your ancestor's or relative's name in Griffith's Valuation or the 1901 census or 1911 census.
- e.g.:
- Griffith map references 1-8 and 8a-9.
- Note the Ord. S. map sheet or sheets on which the townland appears.
For urban locations, identify the street address(es) and precise location:
- The same location may have different numbers in
- I like to use "no. " to denote Griffith numbers, "house" to denote census numbers and no prefix to refer to local numbers.
- e.g. 6 Frances Street in Kilrush is no. 56 Frances Street in Griffith's Valuation, house 9 in Frances Street in 1901 and house 45 in Francis [mistranscribed sic] Street in 1911.
- Examples:
- Streets can be renumbered when new houses are inserted in gaps or houses are divided or merged.
- As seen here, it is sometimes necessary to visit the Valuation Office in the Irish Life Centre in Abbey Street in Dublin in order to check the revisions of both maps and valuation lists.
Check the townland index for:
- civil parish
- barony
- county
- Poor Law Union (PLU, Superintendent Registrar's District, Registration District)
(particularly when there are multiple townlands with the same name).
Check the 1901 census or 1911 census for:
- District Electoral Division (DED)
In 1911, the rural part of Gillabbey was in Bishopstown DED. Minerva Terrace, Gillabbey Street and Gillabbey Terrace were in Cork No. 5 Urban DED.
Check the logainm.ie maps for:
- Dispensary District (Registrar's District)
Bishopstown DED is in Cork Rural Dispensary District.
In a new browser tab or window, locate the townland at maps.osi.ie:
- It may show up using Search, By Name
- It will almost certainly show up using Search, By County
- Gillabbey and other Cork suburban townlands are missing!
- In problem cases, search for a nearby townland: Knocknacullen West is listed.
- Townland boundaries are red; parish boundaries are green; barony boundaries are yellow.
- Move the precise location of interest to the red + symbol in the centre of the window and copy-and-paste and/or bookmark the location.
- Other map websites are missing this crucial red + placeholder or equivalent.
In a second browser tab (or window), locate the townland at askaboutireland.ie:
- On the search results screen, follow the "Click here to the map in an [sic] new window" link.
- Zooming in may not bring you exactly to the townland you want - so it may help to know whether the townland straddles more than one Ord. S. map sheet.
- Zooming and panning do not change the URL, so it is not possible to bookmark a precise location.
- The URL includes a temporary "mysession" parameter, so one can successfully bookmark or link to only the search results page.
- Use Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab (or Alt-Tab and Alt-Shift-Tab) to switch back and forth between maps.osi.ie and askaboutireland.ie tabs (or windows).
- For Gillabbey, Map Version 1 of 3 has no plot numbers for the part of the townland inside the Municipal Boundary and plot numbers outside the Municipal Boundary are later than Griffith's Valuation (the County Gaol is in no. 9 in Griffith, but in no. 5 on the map).
- Map Versions 2 and 3 are similar.
- findmypast.ie sometimes has earlier maps, contemporaneous with Griffith (check under "Gillabbey" and "Gillabbey, townparks of").
- In this case, the FindMyPast map is similar to the askaboutireland maps.
- One can sometimes understand minor changes to plot numbers by considering relative plot sizes and descriptions.
- In Gillabbey:
- It can be helpful to use Ctrl-PrintScreen to capture a relevant section of the map and then annotate it using your favourite image editor
- Case studies:
- Use the Modern Map/Historical Map slider in the top right corner of the window to identify the plot of interest on the present-day Google map.
- Put the red + on the Historic 6" OSi map on the plot of interest and toggle to the present-day OSi Street Map for an alternative view.
In a third browser tab, locate the townland at maps.google.com:
- The Google Maps system may work better in Google Chrome than in other web browsers.
- Find the plot of interest by searching and/or panning.
- Point-and-click the X in the search box, move the cursor away and hit the <Escape> key a couple of times to remove the clutter at top left.
- Drag-and-drop the little yellow man from towards the bottom right to the plot of interest.
- To hide more clutter, point-and-click "Hide imagery" at middle right.
- Keyboard shortcuts:
- Watch the two compass icons at bottom left (black arrow pointing in the direction that you are facing) and bottom right (red arrow pointing North) to get your bearings.
- To create a link or a bookmark to either map or Street View:
- There is access to one set of Street View images from 2009-2011 in most parts of Ireland.
- Historians and genealogists will want access to older images when the Google cameras have revisited the location: where are they available?

There are similar websites for other parts of the world, e.g. Philadelphia.