Using Maps and GIS as Research Aids in Genealogy

November 19, 2020 — Keith Hupperts

Standing atop Crook Peak, the last high point as the Mendip Hills march west into the Bristol Channel, about 20 miles southwest of Bristol, England, provides a sweeping panorama over the moorlands below.  Eastward the Mendips, an English designated Area of Outstanding Beauty, stretch out in a rolling series of limestone hills, forests, and meadows past Cheddar and Wells.  In the distance the Glastonbury Tor, rich in Arthurian legends, pokes it head into the sky.  North and west lay hills that roll gently down to farms and pastureland that abuts the Bristol Channel, with Wales rising across the water.

Figure 1: View across Axbridge and Somerset County
Figure 1: View across Axbridge and Somerset County

Southward lies the reason that I traveled to Somerset and walked among the Mendips.  My great-great-great-grandfather, William Crockett Cuff, was born and raised in the town of Axbridge, nestled between the hills and the moorlands.  While I gaze around at the pastoral beauty below me, enjoying an afternoon stroll through the hilltops, I wonder at the pluck and courage William must have had to, at the age of 33, pack up his family of 9, sell everything he owns, and set sail on 2-month long winter crossing of the Atlantic, to make a new life in America.

However, this isn’t strictly an immigrant story.  As both a Geography-nerd and a history buff recently investigating my family’s personal history, I’ve endeavored to bring these two hobbies together.  So, this is a tale of genealogical research and how maps aid in that effort, providing context and often adding new insights to information gathered from church, civil, and other sources.  I also spend time digging into the GEDCOM format that applications such as Ancestory.com and others use as the de-facto format for sharing genealogical information.  Finally, I’ll build a few maps based on my ancestor’s lives using Esri Story Maps.

Figure 2: Axbridge Parish Tithing Map from 1840

The 1841 England Census lists William, his wife Mary Goodman, along with his cousin living on the ‘Church Steps’.  It’s an interesting address but until my visit I couldn’t locate it.  Talking with Axbridge locals allowed me to discover that it was literally a small home right off the step of stairs that led from the main square up to the church perched above it.  Luckily, there are some great historical mapping resources available for the UK.  One of them is the South West Heritage Trust.  SWHT has a series of old Tithing maps and Ordinance Survey maps from the 1800s that allowed me to put their home in reference to the rest of the town.  In the 1851 UK Census they lived in the last house in town on West Street, which appropriately enough, is the street heading west from the town square in Figure 2.

In 1853, William and Mary headed to the United States, following in Mary’s family’s footsteps first to upstate New York, and then, according to personal records, they moved on to Marcellon Township in 1857 and up to Packwaukee, Wisconsin 15 miles north by 1860.  William passed away late in 1860 and the family relocated back to Marcellon Township to live with Mary’s brother.

The Wisconsin Historical Society has a series of county plat books starting in 1873 with section maps detailing land ownership tells the story of my great-great and great grandfathers.   These maps were easily downloaded and georeferenced to the PLSS layer available from the BLM using ArcGIS Pro tools.  Simply load the image into ArcGIS Pro, select the Imagery toolbar in the ribbon, and then select the Georeference tool.  Add control points so that the section corners of the image align with the PLSS section corners.

After the 4 maps were georeferenced, I digitized properties related to my ancestors on top of the images.  I then loaded them into a Esri Story map to make viewing and comparing how ownership changed over time simple.  This also provided me with an easy way to share this work with relatives who wanted to visit some of these places.

Figure 3:  Plat map from 1873 of Marcellon Township with control points in the Township corners.
Figure 3: Plat map from 1873 of Marcellon Township with control points in the Township corners.
Figure 4: Story map showing family lands in Marcellon Township.

GEDCOM

As mentioned earlier, the GEDCOM format is the de facto standard for exporting and importing data between Genealogy applications.  There are a lot of different applications out there and you can find one that meets your needs through lists like this one from PCmag.com.  If you’re using an online paid subscription service like Ancestry.com be sure to check that it supports exporting and importing with the GEDCOM format so that if you decide to switch apps you can download your information.

The GEDCOM data format is a text-based file that uses a lineage-linked data model…data is structured to reflect the nuclear families and individuals.  There is a header section, records, and a trailer section.  Individual records within each section have a level number.  Top-level records, such as records for an individual or a family, have a level number of 0.  Details about an individual have higher level numbers depending upon how deep the record goes.  The example shows the header section, which details information about the application used to generate the file.  Also included is my Individual record, starting at line 10, details about my birth, where I’ve lived, and nuclear families I’m a part of (lines 46 & 47).  Frankly, most of the data is in the source records, and it’s hard to make heads or tails of it by looking at the GEDCOM file.

Luckily, there are tools available to help reformat this information into something that is a bit more readable.  I downloaded a free tool called Oxy-Gen, which someone has been tinkering with for 15 or so years.  When run, it generates a set of CSV files that make tracing relationships much easier and few files with location information.  This includes City, County, State, & Country information for events like births and deaths, as well as Latitude and Longitude of some cities in the file, but not all.

Mapping Data from the GEDCOM in ArcGIS

The program I used had free text fields for Location information, so the consistency of the location details was not very good.  A location like Axbridge could have different spellings or be missing county or region information.  Other locations with common names could be assigned to the state or even country.  After a few hours of data scrubbing in Excel get City, County, State/Region, and Country standardized, I was able to get a bit more than 2800 of the 3300 family member records clean enough to geocode their birth locations and import into a layer in AGOL.  (Unfortunately, geocoding that many points blew through my AGOL credits and cost me $20.  So, be careful😉.)

Figure 5: Birth locations for members of family tree going back to the 1500s

Once I had the points mapped, I created a Time-enabled Family Births Web App that allows me to view births over time.  By turning on the Time Series capability of the layer in ArcGIS Pro, I could create a second web service that enabled me to display births by decade to visualize where and when family members were born.   One group of my English ancestors migrated to the US in the 1600s, settling mostly in Connecticut, before spreading out to Wisconsin.  A second wave followed in the mid-1800s.  My German ancestors came mostly from the Rhineland area and settled in Racine, WI before dispersing to other parts of the US.

Figure 6: William Cuff's immigration route

I used the events of William Cuff’s life to create a map to give that history stored in parish and public records a new look and feel bringing a spatial context to his life.  His time in England was spent moving between Somerset and Bristol.

Summary

Most source documents for Genealogic research are old books, records, newspapers, photos among others.  But maps, like the plat maps above, can also be important source documents that add interesting elements to the story.  What is more, they can be used to take the source information and add a spatial component that can lead to new and deeper insights.

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Keith Hupperts

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