Connect with Your Ancestors Using Google Maps
Most smartphone owners use apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps all the time for directions to any new place, estimating drive times, planning trips, looking for conveniently located restaurants or other businesses, etc. But have you ever used them for genealogy?
I love looking up homes and other places that were important to my ancestors. It can help me to better understand where and how they lived—how far did they have to travel to school, to work, or to a hospital, and how far did they really move from one home to another? It helps me to get a feel for the towns they might have lived in and the climates they might have experienced. Were they near rivers or oceans? How far did they live from their families?
This is the difference between genealogy and family history. It brings people’s stories to life, making them feel more real, no longer confined to the names and dates on their vital records and tombstones.
I fall in love with these places. I daydream about buying and restoring their homes. I feel nostalgia for places I haven’t visited in decades and even for places I’ve never seen before.
Keep in mind that most places won’t look exactly like they did two centuries, or even two decades ago, but this can give you a good idea of what your ancestors would have seen and experienced, especially if you’re looking at one isolated building or property. For example, a city would certainly have changed a great deal and a university would likely have expanded, but a single home (if still standing) is less likely to have undergone such significant exterior remodel, though it may have been fixed up a bit, as you’ll see in my example.
The first and most difficult part of this digital tour is finding an address, which is often not difficult at all.
Lots of records can include an address:
Censuses
Vital records
Obituaries and other newspaper articles
Military records (check WWI and WWII draft cards!)
City directories
Land records
Probate records
And don’t discount family/personal knowledge.
Ask your older relatives for their childhood addresses, or even look up your own! They may also remember or have records of old addresses for their grandparents or other relatives. Check old address books, letters, or postcards if you have access to any.
In addition to home addresses, you can find churches, hospitals, cemeteries, places of employment, and more which may have been significant places in the lives of your ancestors. For these, check the records listed above plus
Yearbooks
Employment records
Wills
Invitations and programs from graduations, weddings, funerals, and religious ceremonies like baptisms or first communion
Personal effects like scrapbooks, journals, match books, personal mementos, etc.
Some example records, with address information highlighted:
(1930 US Federal Census, city directory, death certificate, marriage license, draft registration cards)
In some instances, especially with US census records and city directories, the address is broken up across multiple fields, but the whole thing is there. In other cases, such as the marriage and death records pictured, the address of the primary person in the record is included, and they also recorded the addresses of additional relatives!
On Ancestry, I found a U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995 entry for my great-grandfather, Homer Hinton. In 1955 he lived at “212 13th av W Bradenton, Palmetto [County], Florida.” I simply pasted that address into Google Maps to pull up his house. (Tip: If it’s visible, check the address number on the building to make sure you’ve got the right place. An old building may or may not still be there, especially if you’re using older records in a part of the US that has changed substantially since the record was created.)
Isn’t it cute?!
And it gets better. In many locations, you can view older Google Maps images to see how a place has changed over time. (This history will only ever go back as far as 2007, when Google Street View was first introduced in the United States.) Click the clock icon in the top left menu to see what’s available. In this case, the images go back to 2011!
You can see that this house has had a little bit of TLC in the past few years. It’s nice to know that someone cares about this home even though it’s not in my family anymore and the current owners/residents probably have never heard of my family.
Another feature of Google Maps that can be especially helpful is My Maps, which Google touts as a “way to keep track of the places that matter to you.“ You can mark various locations, draw routes and boundaries, etc., to map your family history. You could create a map of where your ancestors lived during a particular census year, make a map of ancestor’s birthplaces, track their migration, map cemeteries where relatives are buried, etc.
Genealogist Nicole Dyer presented a great tutorial on this tool at RootsTech Connect 2021:
How to Map Creeks, Roads, and More with Custom Google MyMaps
Genealogy can feel tedious and even boring for some people when it’s reduced to a simple list of names, dates, and places. The history can feel vague and irrelevant without stories and context. But family history is where we connect to our ancestors, discover their stories, learn from them, and truly connect with our past. Physically or digitally exploring the places where they lived is one of endless ways we can immerse ourselves in their world to get a good look at who these people were and what they experienced during their lives.