The use of MAPS is essential to your genealogy and using them can help you bring life to your heritage story. This is a step that a lot of people like to skip, but I advise it.
Now that there are so many maps on line you may not need to get to a real map library, but personally I like the hands-on of a map library, pulling out a drawer and having a look a a great old paper or paper-canvas map, and some university geography departments have great collections!
YOU WANT TO FIND MAPS that represent the features of the place you are researching designed at the time that your ancestors were living there. And then compare with the newer maps.
Today MAPQUEST and GOOGLE MAPS are two of my favorite on-line resources.
Newer maps have an advantage in giving you the highways and directions for getting there by car, when you take a family history trip to the Old Country. You can speed down a highway that goes through three countries in a few hours, a trip that took weeks by horse in the good old days...
But here are some interesting features I have found on old maps that helped me tell the story of an ancestor...
Native American villages, Indian Reservations, National Parklands (recently established), hunting trails, wagon train trails, historical markers and monuments.
Bridges, golf courses, schools, the Masonic lodge, and the post office - all gone now (now the town's a slum).
Plat Maps (farms) in Pennsylvania, maps of Spanish land grants in California, maps of land grants to Civil War Soldiers, maps of land won in the Georgia land lottery (the Cherokee were moved away).
Maybe most important Maps that show old counties and how they were divided through the years and illustrate compromises between state borders; these help you situate research in the current county that holds the old county's records.
You get the idea, so now get that map!
