ROOTS & BRANCHES

Even before I was interested in genealogy, I was captivated by maps.

Political maps with country and state borders, physical maps with the greens for plains and reds for mountains, road maps with all their symbols – it didn’t matter, I would examine them, trace them, even freehand them.

What got me thinking again about maps in this broader way was undoubtedly putting the finishing touches on an atlas of historical German maps that will be published later this year.

My No. 1 reason for wanting to do this atlas revolves around helping people with German-speaking ancestry to making the connections between their immigrant forbears’ places of origin and the larger jurisdictions – political and religious – to which those places belonged to historically as well as belong to today.

This is important because the knowledge of the larger jurisdictions helps determine where records relating to these ancestors are archived.

This can be somewhat challenging because Germany has what I call a “non-linear” political history. In the United States, new municipalities and counties are generally created from existing entities – a “linear” political history. Germany, on the other hand, was a collection of small, independent states that were constantly being sliced, diced and otherwise disconnected as noble dynasties went extinct, lost wars or were divided amongst sons.

But the utility of maps in genealogy goes far beyond just the ones in this atlas. Here are a few examples:

• Physical maps – both historical and the present-day ones on Google Earth – show the reasons why the people of two areas that adjoin might not interact a whole lot … for example, if there’s a mountain range in between.
• Or maps showing the languages and dialects spoken currently and historically, which may explain why people of the same ethnicity may not have had perfect communication … for example, if they spoke radically different dialects.
• Contemporary maps, those dating to the time period they depict, often aren’t as accurate as today’s … but they do reflect peoples’ geographic knowledge from a past era, which may be instructive about how those people viewed their world.

Finally, there are sometimes that overlay maps – ones that show both historical and modern-day boundaries – can be particularly useful.

For just one example, there were several German states in the 19^th century that had Hesse as part of their names. And, as an example of that non-linear history, their boundaries changed during the century. Partially as a result, the names of these states as listed in American records sometimes change for documents relating the same person – depending on whether the record was asking for the name of the German state as it was when the person lived there … or the state’s name when the record was (later) created.

Such an overlay map can help triangulate in what part of Hesse the person’s village of origin will be found.