Having a map to hand is both fascinating and useful when it comes to family history research. To follow are ideas for places to look for maps online, to help you explore the locations your ancestors once lived and worked in the British Isles. This Family Tree guide covers a selection of freely available map & place-related websites.
1. Google Maps
Google.com/maps
Place names may have evolved over time, locations may have been developed and road layouts changed since your ancestor’s time, but nonetheless Google Maps makes for a very comprehensive useful starting point when learning about the whereabouts of a new place that you have come across in your family history searches. It’s handy too for planning trips.
2. National Records of Scotland
https://maps.nls.uk/
Find more than quarter of a million maps to search, zoom and download on the National Records of Scotland website, which includes coverage across the British Isles.
Notable collections: The Ordnance Survey maps (https://maps.nls.uk/os/) are invaluable for family and local history research. Spanning the 1840s to the 1960s, often in extraordinary detail. For instance explore the beautifully informative 1:500 town plans for England: https://maps.nls.uk/os/townplansengland/towns.html# Note the terms of use carefully. While many of the maps on the NLS website are available under a generous version of the Creative Commons licence, some of the collections provide more restrictive usage. This may be important if you wish to publish the image on a blog, in a book, guide etc.
Usage advice is important to note when exploring other sites mentioned to follow too.
3. FamilySearch: Where am I from?
https://www.familysearch.org/discovery/explore/generations
If you have a family tree on FamilySearch, make use of the ‘Where am I from?’ tool that will plot the birth locations of your family back 8 generations.
4. National Library of Wales Places
https://places.library.wales
For the 300,000 entries on this website you can view the digitised ti
