Ever had an ancestor that moved around a lot
and you just can't wrap your head around it? Well, I want to show you how to use
Google My Maps to help your research make more sense.
Hi, I'm Melissa Finlay
with boundlessgenealogy.com, here as a guest contributor on Family History
Fanatics this is part 3 of my series on how to use Google My Maps for your
family history. I hope you've caught the previous two
videos so that you know some basics about how to use Google My Maps. Remember,
you need to create your Google My Maps on a computer, either a desktop or laptop,
but you can access it from anywhere, even on mobile devices. So let's jump into
this situation. Here I had done some research on a man named Joseph John
Finley and I found a tiny clue that he was a Coast Guardsman in Ireland during
his lifetime. So, this led me to the UK Archives' online microfilm collection and
they have a whole lot of microfilms about the Coast Guard. Thankfully I was
able to find him and trace his career throughout Ireland for about 40 years
when he served as a Coast Guardsman. However, I was really confused about the
places. He was reassigned to different ports about every couple of years and
from the clues I could gather, his family was moving with him. So I wanted to find
a way to make this all make more sense to my mind because I don't know the
geography of Ireland very well, and every time I would just do a basic map search
to find these places they weren't showing up on any map. So, what do you do
in this circumstance? Well, I still think it's worth making a Google My Map for
them, but you need to do it in conjunction with a couple of other tools.
the first tool is a gazetteer. A gazetteer is basically a place
dictionary. So when your ancestor is listed in records with place names that
you can no longer find on a map, whether that be in Ireland or the United States
or anywhere else, you can go and find an old
gazetteer basically from the same time period that your ancestor was living
there. So in this case I went to the digital collection of books, including
gazetteers, on archive.org, The Internet Archive, and I looked up gazetteer
Ireland and I was looking for something that was published between the 1820s and
the 1860s because this is when Joseph John Finley was serving in the Coast
Guard. So this gazetteer would be the most
accurate as to place names at that time. So I found this gazetteer and I started
looking at the place names. The nice thing about these digital books is you
can just come to the search bar and you type in your place. Now in my case it
took a little bit of sleuthing because the place names as spelled in the Coast
Guard records and the place name is spelled here were slightly different
from one another. Sometimes you have to use some variations on the spellings.
But eventually I was able to find most of the places and the gazetteer gives in
description of the place. So if we zoom in here, you can see that for example,
this Broadford, it says a small village nine miles from Killaloe in
the parish of Kilseily and I know I'm pronouncing these all wrong but I don't,
I don't know how to pronounce Ireland places. County of Clare on the road of
Ennis, near which is the residence of Hurlstone. And then it even says fairs
are held in June and November so if you wanted to go visit that back then you
would know, you were looking at this gazetteer and you know you could go there in
those months and find the fairs. Anyway, it basically gives the name of the place
and a description of the place so that you can then, in our case we're going to
use that description to find it on a map. Then what I did is find a historic map
of the location also. So you can find these in lots of places, there's a lot of
websites that now have digital maps of historic places. In this case, I was also
able to find a map of Ireland on archive.org from the time period I was
looking for. So, in conjunction with the gazetteer and the records I have for the
Coast Guardsman, I was able to come to this map,
and you can zoom far in, and as you can see, because I was of course looking for
places along the coastline, I was able to come along the coast and in conjunction
with the descriptions from the gazetteer I was able to find the historic ports
where he was serving as Coast Guardsmen. Most of those ports no longer
exist, very few of them still have ruins. Most of them are just completely gone
and the coastline has actually changed quite a bit
in the hundred and fifty years since this time period. So this map helped me a
lot. Between the map and the gazetteer that gave me enough information to come
back to my Google My Map and I created this map, it's called Finlay Coast Guard
1823 to 1877, because that's the years where the Finlay man I was looking for
in some other Finlay men that I also extracted records for were serving in
the Coast Guard. And I started placing markers on the map in this case I
thought it was really fun to add an anchor as the location so you can see
this particular one that I marked is Port-A-Cloy 1830. This is when Joseph
Finlay was serving at that port, and this port no longer exists in Ireland at this
day, so those gazetteers and the historic maps helped me. And I just
continued to mark all of the places that I knew about from his life this outlines
place is another technique you can use on Google My Maps. It's another one of
the features. It's next to the directions tab that you can add directions, but this
one just lets you outline something. So in this case, we knew the county where he
was born, from various records, but not a specific location. So we just outlined
the entire county to demark where he had been born and then we knew where
some of his children were born and where he had registered to become a Coast
Guardsman, so we put all of those items on there as well. And we knew
where he had retired too, so we put that on the map as well. And you know what
happened when we made this map even though it took a little bit of sleuthing,
because first we had to find the Coast Guard records, then we had to look up
those places in the gazetteer, then we had to find the corresponding location
on the historic map, and then finally add it to our Google My Map. But all of a
sudden what made a lot more sense was the first places of his children. He
never immigrated to the United States but most of his children and his wife
did and in their records they had what seems to be disparate birth places. We
couldn't figure out why was one child born in this place and why was another
child born in that place but once we figured out this map of his Coast Guard
service, it all made sense. Basically, his family was just traveling around with
him and the different children were born in different port locations where he was
serving. Do you have a very mobile ancestor in mind that you want to create
a map for now? tell us about them in the comments below remember to subscribe to
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