Changing Place Names Mapped

The Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, part of the Polish Academy of Sciences, has unveiled a new interactive map feature on their website: Mapy z Przeszłością (Maps of the Past). The online tool superimposes historical maps over a modern map of Central and Eastern Europe, allowing researchers to visualize and compare shifting borders and place names over time. 

The turbulent nature of Poland’s history, with its boundaries expanding, contracting, and disappearing over several centuries, is reflected in the geographic range of the maps available as overlays. The new map tool is useful for users with ancestry from modern Poland, Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, or the historical territories of the German, Russian and Austrian Empires.

In Central and Eastern European genealogy, you will encounter place names that changed depending on who controlled an area and when. This complicates research as we sort out and weigh the accuracy of the various place names that are found in overseas sources. For example, researching a Lithuanian immigrant ancestor, you may find that their town of origin is reported in its Polish form in the sources of the country they emigrated to, such as Great Britain, America or Australia, reflecting the official name from the early nineteenth century. The same town or village may be recorded in another record with an approximation of its Russian name, from when Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire. The town name may also appear in its Lithuanian form, which became official in the twentieth century. Researchers with Jewish ancestry may also find a distinct Yiddish form of their ancestral town or village recorded in overseas sources.

A historical map with Polish placenames overlayed on a modern map of Grodno, Belarus

With the new map overlays, a researcher can alternate between historical periods, translating placenames in the process. This is most effective for placenames with Polish and German variants. Pay attention to the names of nearby towns and villages. Those placenames may appear later in religious or civil records. Some maps also include symbols that mark the nearest religious community.

State Library of Victoria Maps and Plans

The State Library of Victoria has just reached a significant milestone, having now digitised over 30,000 maps and plans.  The library's maps and plans are being digitised in the Library’s Imaging Studio and Scanning Studio by their Digital Production team.

Australian maps, especially those covering Victoria, are the main focus of this collection, though the Library also has many maps from overseas.

As well as a total of over 110,000 maps – enough to carpet metropolitan Melbourne – the physical collection includes geographical and cartographic reference books and atlases.

There is a wealth of rare and antique maps in the collection, including maps showing the first outlines of the Australian coast, charts by Matthew Flinders and early Dutch maps. The 19th-century township, parish, county and squatting maps can provide all sorts of leads for those investigating their family history.

Drainage plans produced by the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW) from the late 19th century to the 1940s give a fascinating historical record of Melbourne streetscapes and features.

There are several thousand auction plans showing the layout of suburban estates, and large collections of fire insurance plans, aerial photographs, geological and goldmining maps. The library also holds topographic maps from government agencies such as Land Victoria and Geoscience Australia.

Significant overseas holdings include maps by the British Ordnance Survey, nautical charts covering all corners of the globe, and 19th-century maps of India.

As the selection of maps and plans which have been digitised grows they are made available online through the library's online catalogue, including the majority of their historical Victorian county and parish maps, MMBW, auction and fire insurance plans.

English and Welsh Maps Free Online

The National Library of Scotland has announced a major new online resource for family historians - a collection of English and Welsh maps covering more than 100 years.

The highly detailed zoomable maps of England and Wales from 1842 to 1952 allow anyone to browse through a catalogue of place names, modern street names, postcodes and grid references. You can access the maps at maps.nls.uk/os/6inch-england-and-wales/info1.html.

The website compiles 37,390 sheets, including 35,124 quarter sheets of A2 size, and 2,236 full sheets at A0 size, which makes for a wide range of search options.

The National Library of Scotland’s map digitisation work in recent years has been externally funded, leading to a recent expansion in map images beyond Scotland including a Victorian plan of London which was uploaded last year.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping system is the most detailed map scale to cover England and Wales and can record most man-made features in the landscape such as roads, railways, fields, fencing, streams and buildings. Smaller features such as letterboxes, bollards and mileposts can also be seen.

For many of the towns featured, the maps show the detailed urbanisation and rapidly changing landscape from 1914 through to the 1940s thanks to 25 inch to the mile mapping.

Although images can only be viewed individually, you have the option via the map group tool to look at an area from the 1840’s up until 1952. 

Pastmap - maps of Scotland

Have you discovered PastMap yet?  Pastmap is a free website allowing researchers to view information about the archaeology, architecture and landscapes of Scotland on one single map. It is managed by Historic Environment Scotland (HES) along with partners from local government and archaeological curators, and holds data from a growing number of other sources.

You can look at different layers, such as local authority Historic Environment Records (HERs), or Listed Building data from HES. You can choose to display layers on a map or aerial photograph and you can turn the layers on or off. Use the search or zoom tools to explore the map and delve into historic sites across Scotland.

When you find a site of interest – like a standing stone, a castle or a designed landscape – click on it to show more detail in the sidebar. Select a group of objects by drawing a shape or circle around them. Once you have made your selection, you can download a report of up to 1,000 records to view later.

Different types of maps include

• Modern.  Look at the locations of Scotland’s sites and monuments superimposed on today’s Ordnance Survey and OpenStreetMap bases
• Historic - Use historic 19th and 20th century OS maps as a backdrop to historic environment data and look at how the landscape has changed over time
• Aerial - Compare features from the air against what is known in Scotland’s historic environment records, and look in more detail from a bird’s-eye view
• Data - Discover where the archaeology, historic buildings and landscapes of Scotland are, and follow the links to their descriptions and stories

Welsh tithe maps go online

Do you have Welsh ancestry?  The National Library of Wales has completed a project to make tithe maps of Wales searchable online.
The new Places of Wales website is in beta and welcomes feedback from visitors.  It makes over 300,000 records searchable online, along with accompanying apportionment documents.
Tithes were payments charged on land users. Originally, payments were made using commodities like crops, wool, milk and stock. Tithe maps were produced between 1838 and 1850 to ensure that all tithes were paid with money rather than produce.
These are the most detailed maps of their period and they cover more than 95% of Wales. The apportionments accompanying each map list the payable tithes, the names of the landowners and land occupiers, the land use, and in most cases (75%) the field names.
An almost complete set of the tithe maps for Wales is held in the National Library of Wales as part of the diocesan records of the Church in Wales, who kindly consented to them being digitised as part of the Cynefin project.  A complete set of accompanying tithe apportionments was supplied in digital form by The National Archives in London, who had digitised these documents before the start of the project.

PRONI Historical Maps viewer

From the PRONI website comes the following announcement :

PRONI and Land and Property Services (Ordnance Survey and Spatial NI) have worked together to digitise and make available a range of historical Ordnance Survey maps.

The historical maps available on this application are from the 6 inch County Series mapping; and latterly the Irish Grid. Maps available cover the six counties of present-day Northern Ireland: counties Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone.

Historical Ordnance Survey Maps

The historical maps available on this application are from the 6 inch County Series mapping; and latterly the Irish Grid. Maps available cover the six counties of present-day Northern Ireland: counties Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone. The following map editions are available on the application:

Edition 1 (1832 – 1846)
Edition 2 (1846 – 1862)
Edition 3 (1900 - 1907)
Edition 4 (1905 - 1957)
Edition 5 (1919 – 1963)
6” Irish Grid (1952-1969)
1:10,000 metric Irish Grid (1957-1986)

To access the maps visit https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/services/search-proni-historical-maps-viewer 

So take a look and the new maps available.

Britain From Above

Launched in June 2006, Britain from Above presents the unique Aerofilms collection of aerial photographs, providing access to scans of glass prints and negatives drawn from the collection from 1919-2006. You can register (registration is free) to zoom into these amazing pictures, identify unlocated images, and share memories.  The collection is varied and includes urban, suburban, rural, coastal and industrial scenes, providing important evidence for understanding and managing the built and natural environments.
Over 7,700 new aerial photographs have been made available to view in the past few months, including over 1,500 snaps of Welsh cities such as Cardiff and Swansea.This brings the collection up to over 69,000 images.

Blaeu Atlas of Scotland

The Blaeu Atlas if the first atlas of Scotland, published in 1654.  It contains 49 engraved maps and 154 pages of descriptive text.  You can search the entire atlas or browse for respective maps or descriptions individually, with relevant sections for the north east, west and south of Scotland.  The atlas has been translated from Latin into English for the first time and is available through the National Library of Scotland.

The Down Survey

The Down Survey, so called because a chain was laid down and a scale made, was taken from 1656-8 under the direction of William Petty. Using the Civil Survey as a guide, teams of surveyors, mainly former soldiers, were sent out under Petty’s direction to measure every townland to be forfeited to soldiers and adventurers. The resulting maps, made at a scale of 40 perches to one inch (the modern equivalent of 1:50,000), were the first systematic mapping of a large area on such a scale attempted anywhere. The primary purpose of these maps was to record the boundaries of each townland and to calculate their areas with great precision. The maps are also rich in other detail showing churches, roads, rivers, castles, houses and fortifications. Most towns are represented pictorially and the cartouches, the decorative titles, of each map in many cases reflect a specific characteristic of each barony.


These maps and a lot more information have now been placed online on a web site created by Trinity College Dublin. If you can trace your ancestors back to the 1600s, you may be able to find a lot more about them by using the maps of the Down Survey of Ireland web site. Not only will you find names, but eve maps of their villages, showing roads, churches, and even buildings.


The maps chart the changes in land ownership in Ireland. Users can search by the names of landowners in 1641 and in 1670. It also displays ownership by religion. The web site also displays a lot of other historical information, such as roads and even a Map of the Ulster 1641 Depositions showing the number of recorded murders in each townland.

Old Maps Online

The Old Maps Online portal allows you to search for and access old maps for free.  Type a place name into the search engine and thumbnail pictures appear.  You can then click on the one you want to view.  There is a list of collections from where the maps have been collated with links to the repositry holding the originals.

Valuation Office Survey

Part of the National Archives website, the Valuation Office Survey was carried out between 1910 and 1915 to assess all site values in the UK for taxation purposes.  The catalogue contains descriptions of nearly 50,000 Valuation Office Survey maps.  When searching you need to have an idea of where your ancestor was living, such as an address from the 1911 census.
The maps serve as the means of reference to more than 95,000 Valuation Office Field Books which contain descriptions of more than 9 million individual houses, farms and other properties, detailing the use and value of lands and buildings, and naming their owners and occupiers. Valuation Office Field Books can only be viewed at The National Archives.