For 26 weeks I will take you on a family history journey through the alphabet, one letter at a time. I have decided that each post will be educational in nature, focusing on topics related to resources, methodology, tools, etc. Although the challenge is complete, there are still some people who are finishing up and Alona, the host, is encouraging others to participate anyway. Additional information on the challenge, can be found at Take the ‘Family History Through the Alphabet’ Challenge.
This week it’s all about maps. I love maps. They are great tools for genealogists and often help us solve research problems. In this post, I’ll share a few examples of how I use maps in my own research. Plotting Land Owners
For rural dwellers, creating a map of our ancestors can be very helpful. We can visually see what parcels of land a they owned and who their neighbors were. This can help solve many mysteries. For example, when I plotted out part of a township where both my fifth great-grandfathers, Aaron Webster and Robert Parks, owned land in Oakland County, Michigan, I saw several familiar surnames. One of Aaron’s daughters married Zadock Bates and the other married Erastus or Orestes Millard. Both of these surnames appear in close proximity to the land that Aaron owned, so it’s possible that the daughters’ spouses are related to those nearby families. I created a map by simply drawing it out using the land descriptions for all the federal land grants in the sections I was interested in.
In another instance, I was trying learn the origin of an Iowa family, who had apparently previously lived in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Missouri. Using the 1885 Iowa census, which includes the place of birth for each person, as well as a land description, I decided to plot the family’s neighbors who were in the same place and the same time in hopes of finding connections between the families in other locations. For example, one neighboring family had a child born in Missouri in 1874, as did my family. While I haven’t been able to actually solve this mystery, I am hopeful that researching the neighbors further will be of help. Again, this one is a hand-drawn map, but I only plotted families with similarities to my family (I can always go back and add in the rest).
Plotting City Residences
In addition to my rural folks, I have a lot of city dwellers, particularly in Chicago. I use Google Maps all the time for various reasons. For example, plotting the family on a map can help you figure out what churches to search. I had my Ward/McMahon family mapped out for different reasons (comparing locations to other possible family members), but when the Catholic church records for Chicago became available through FamilySearch, I decided it was time to do some digging, but I had no idea where to begin.
Looking at the map I had already created, I began to go through all of the Catholic churches listed at ChicagoAncestors and determine where each had been located and the years of operation (I could have used city directories for this as well). Once I identified a possible church, I plotted it on the map. If I found that an event had occurred for the family, I added the details to the map’s location description. Here’s the map I created. If you click through to view it on Google, you will see the descriptions of all the pins and see how I have it organized by family and year.
View Wards/McMahons in Chicago in a larger map
I’ve also used Google Maps to help with foreign research. For example, I had some Luxembourg families that were apparently in three different communes in two different cantons. Seeing them all on the map, I realized that they were actually pretty close to each other.
View Luxembourg in a larger map
And you can read about my map project for my Prussian research here.
Boundary Changes
Maps are especially helpful in discovering boundary changes. These changes could be at any level, including territory, state, county, etc. One tool that I like is AniMap. In the following two images, you can see how the county boundaries changed for New York from 1794 to 1799 and one of the places I research belonged to two different counties, thus two different places to research.
Wrap Up
These are just a few examples but I hope that this post gave you some new ideas for using maps in your genealogy research. If you’d like to share how you use maps in your own research, please leave a comment—I’d love to hear other ideas!
Things are a little crazy this week as I migrate my blogs from Blogger to Word Press. So for this week, I will direct you to a few of my past posts about writing and publishing. Enjoy! 
Volunteering for genealogical societies is a great way to give back to the society. It also gives you a chance to meet new people who share your passion for genealogy and allows you an opportunity to learn from those around you. 
University libraries are probably one of the most overlooked repositories when it comes to genealogy research. But the universities in the states in which your ancestors lived should definitely be on your list of places to look. These libraries usually contain special collections or archives related to the history of the state as well as the areas surrounding the campus. Even better, many universities are digitizing their archival collections and making them available to the public for free.
Timelines are such a wonderful tool in genealogy research. You can learn so much by looking at a visual depiction of your ancestors over time. From research gaps to research analysis, timelines should always to a go-to method for working through tough research problems. 
As genealogists and family historians, it is important for us to share our research and family stories. We tend to want to preserve our history and memories for our relatives and future generations, but we also hope to connect with others who share our common roots.
A lot of times we learn how to do genealogy research by trial and error. We eventually seek out resources to help us learn more about how to research and how to use certain record types. When we are really stuck, or exploring a locality that is new to us, we may look for resources to help us with research in a particular country or state. Below is a list of references that you may find useful in guiding your genealogy research adventure. 
This week I want to talk about the Periodical Source Index, also known as PERSI. It is essentially a subject index to the articles found in the genealogical and historical periodicals held by the 
Although I could spend weeks writing about organization, I decided on a specific area of organization, that being digital images. In this post I’ll share with you how I structure my files, how I name them, and how to add metadata for future reference.
I have had the NGS Bible Records collection on my list of things to explore for quite some time. Now I have an excuse to check it out and of course write about it and share the resource with my readers.
Message boards and mailing lists can be good tools for genealogy research. There are plenty of boards and lists out there covering a variety of topics, surnames, and places. I tend to favor 
I personally don’t like to receive a ton of email each day, so any way I can reduce that clutter makes me happy. About a year ago, I discovered that I could actually use RSS to subscribe to Ancestry Message Boards and RootsWeb Mailing Lists and read them in my favorite RSS reader at my convenience. I have a folder in my reader dedicated to message boards and mailing lists so they are all grouped together and I get to them when I can. 
If you are on Facebook, you are probably familiar with the Like button. You can “like” someone’s status update, a link they share, or photos they’ve uploaded. Even better than that, you can “like” various Facebook pages created by companies, organizations, and people. 
Why might you want to “like” various genealogy-related pages on Facebook? Here are a few reasons:
