X - Marks the Spot

Look at this great map of Somerset !

I know it is crooked, but I didn't scan it so I'm not accepting any griping about it, I found it on Reddit after a Google search. Apparently it could have been inspiration for Game of Thrones. But I just love it. Dating to the mid 17^th century, with the parishes named and represented by church icons in varying sizes…or are they manor houses ?

There is this one too which dates from about the same time, but has slightly clearer writing - also from Reddit.

A lot of my family came from Somerset to New Zealand, and all had lived in particular areas for generations. Funnily enough they were all living near borders which moved and were not static until fairly recently. The Davys’ in the parishes on either side of the Somerset Devon border and the Bartletts and Coopers near the Somerset Dorset border.

I was surprised to see how closely the Bartletts and Coopers lived to each other. The same names pop up in both parishes. When you consider how widely the Davys family travelled and moved in their little part of Somerset, it is amazing that the Coopers and Bartletts don’t seem to have done the same thing. We did get a couple of DNA matches who descend from a Cooper person who married a Bartlett cousin of my great-great-grandfather in 1862. But as far as I can see that Cooper family is from the same area as the Bartletts – for generations. Maybe mine were too, maybe one of them just left at some point and went a bit further north over the Hamdon Hills…time will tell.

When I am trying to find people in my research I often refer to maps. I love the digitised Ordnance Survey maps at the National Library of Scotland. Great detail and easy to zoom in and navigate. Often when reading a census I look for a map as close to the time period and find the street. Sometimes the footprint of the buildings is marked on a map and if you are lucky the same shape is still there today when you look at a google map of the area. The streets might have changed a little, laneways disappeared, but by comparing the current map and the old you can often work out where things used to be. If it looks like the building is still there, street view is my next step. Until I can work out a way to teleport to the other side of the world, walking down streets looking at buildings and countryside courtesy of a google camera car is the best alternative. Sometimes I just walk down country lanes, unchanged in centuries, to “feel” what it was probably like for my ancestors who trod the same paths or rode along them by horse and cart.

I also use the Phillimore Atlas maps to check neighbouring parishes. These can give me an idea of where else to search when a marriage, baptism or burial isn’t recorded in the parish I expect it to be. My Davys’ and their cousins, for instance, married and baptised their children in almost every parish from Morebath, Clayhanger and Ashbrittle in Devon to Luxborough, Monksilver, Lydiard St Lawrence and Taunton in Somerset.

Lots of local libraries and museums have maps too. It was on such a site that I found an Insurance map for part of Melbourne and was able to identify the house where my great-great-great-grandmother had lived. Also, on another site I found similar maps for Sydney and could work out – with the help of a street directory of the time – where my daughter’s great-great-great-grandparents had lived in Surry Hills. Some maps, particularly in America even show who the landowners were. Sometimes the maps at local libraries haven’t been digitised and you need to go there. A bit of a pain at the moment with the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions curtailing many of those visits.

You can make your own map too, to record where a family moved to, mariner’s voyages, family farms, schools attended. You name it, you can do it.