Tag: ancestors footsteps

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New Release: 1871 UK Census households now plotted on Map Explorer™

Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.*

NEWS: Press Release from TheGenealogist

 

The 1871 Census for England, Scotland and Wales has, for the first time, been georeferenced on TheGenealogist. This is the process of linking a record to a geographical spot and means you can now see where a household stood with links to detailed maps on the powerful Map Explorer™. This is set to make investigating the places where ancestors lived in this year even more interesting for family and house historians.

Viewing a household record from the 1871 census on TheGenealogist will now show a map pinpointing its location. Clicking through from this preview map opens the powerful Map Explorer™ with its georeferenced modern and historical maps. This then enables subscribers to explore their ancestors’ area in much greater detail than on other census sites.

1871 census household pinpointed on Map Explorer™
1871 census household pinpointed on Map Explorer™

Joining the earlier census releases, which saw the 1911, 1901, 1891 and 1881 census linked up to the powerful mapping tool, researchers can now easily identify with just the click of a button where their forebears had once lived and get a sense of the routes their ancestors used.

Using these linked maps allows researchers to trace the thoroughfares that ancestors may have walked down as they went shopping, or popped into their local pubs for a drink. Researchers can likewise, work out the routes that their forebears may have taken to get to their nearby churches, or find the shortest way to their places of work and the direction they needed to go in order to reach their nearby park for relaxation. Historical maps can also reveal where the nearest railway station was to their home, important for understanding how our ancestors could have travelled to other parts of the country to see relatives or to visit their home town.

With this powerful resource, Starter, Gold and Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist can look into their ancestors’ neighbourhood from home on their computer screens, or even access the census and the relevant maps on their mobile phone as they walk down the modern streets.

The Greater London Area, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire along with most towns and cities can be viewed down to the property level, while other parts of the country will identify down to the parish, road or street.

Albert Mansions and Albert Hall
Albert Mansions and Albert Hall

In this particular census year, Queen Victoria opened the Royal Albert Hall, Gilbert and Sullivan premièred the first of their light opera collaborations at the Gaiety Theatre in London and a technologically advanced lighthouse was switched on near Tyne and Wear.

Read my article “Putting 1871 on the map” to discover more as Nick Thorne takes a look at events in 1871 and brings context to the census records.

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/putting-1871-on-the-map-1673/

 

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections. 

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.

TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!

 

*Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links. This does not mean that you pay more just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:

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Family History Research finds moved house

Sous L'Eglise Summer holiday time can be a great opportunity to look at the places where your ancestors lived.

Quite often I have used time visiting an area to walk down the streets where my ancestors footsteps went before me and just imagining how it would have been in their day.

I will have often have prepared for such a trip beforehand. In most cases using the census collections and copies of trade directories to”get a feel” for the location in their era.

It is important to try and understand the social history of the town or area where our forebears lived, but what about our own history? Shouldn’t we try and document our times for those who follow?

As we grow older we constantly find that things have moved on, streets have changed, businesses have closed up, buildings demolished.

This week I was reminded of this fact by a visit from several cousins of mine to Jersey. A first cousin, his daughter plus fiancé, flew in from Canada, while a first cousin once removed, plus husband, came from the Midlands by plane. (If you find cousin relationships difficult to understand then check out my free report here.)

My elder cousin from Canada had memories of certain shops, that he had gone to with our grandparents and would have liked to have taken a trip to. The problem was that they had long since gone or changed in the intervening years.

We managed, however, to do many of the sites that had family associations for us; but I was still struck at how change in my own lifetime had crept up on my local environment. From the reclamation of land for a cinema, swimming-pool complex, 5 star hotel and housing apartments, which now replaces the beach where my science teacher had taken the class to learn some hands-on Marine Biology, to the house by the airport where my younger cousin (now based in England) had once lived as a child.

This was to be a great story as the Georgian farmhouse had been demolished, as new regulations deemed it to be too close to the airport runway. In actual fact there had been a dreadful air crash when my cousins lived in it, but she and her mother were thankfully away from the house at the time. In the fog a light aircraft had flown into said building with the loss of the pilot’s life.

Yesterday we took a trip to the site of the demolished house and walked around the footprint of the building. It was an eerie feeling as we picked our way over the old foundations.

I noticed the former garden still had flowers and plant bushes in it that indicted its past life as a formal front garden. These hardy specimens fighting through the weeds and wild foliage that aimed to sometime soon take control.

The happy ending to this piece is that the house was demolished stone-by-stone and it has sprung up again in restored Georgian glory as the cladding to a replica house a few miles down the road! The project is ongoing and the people behind it have a website here:  http://savethelistedbuilding.com/

Yesterday we were privileged to be allowed to visit the house’s new site and my cousin, who had once lived within its granite structure, was delighted with the restoration and the positive ambience of its new location.

 

Think of those who will come after us, what stories can we leave them about our times?

To download my guide to Cousins, Step-mothers and Half-brothers click on this link.

 

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