Pin Down Your Ancestor With a FAN and a Map!

Good maps are great for genealogical research. Landowner maps are perfect tools for assisting your ancestor hunt. 

Once you have a general idea of the time and place of your ancestor, you should turn your search to finding a map that documents landowners of the time period. These may be legal land administration maps, subscription county maps, or any map referred to as a cadastral map. When looking online, try to search with both "land ownership" and "cadastral" as keywords to see which produces. A cadastral map is a very specific type of map that records legal land parcel boundaries and ownership. Examples of cadastral maps would be land survey plat maps and the modern Wake County iMaps (an interactive geographic system (GIS) maintained by the City of Raleigh). 

 

A cadastral map is but one type of map with names included. Other maps with recorded names exist that are just as useful though they may not be considered official. Topographic maps and county subscription maps fit this category. Sanborn maps can fit this category even though they don't contain names. They are a special case that will be explained later.

An early example, the Moseley Map of  1733, is classified as a topographical and landmark map. Created in 1733 by Edward Moseley (1682-1749), this map shows landowners' names and notable landmarks. His map was marketed in the 1770s as “A New and Correct Map of the Province of North Carolina” showing settlements, inhabitants, soil conditions, rivers, and principal products of NC of that early era. Note how everything is clustered at the coast line at this early point in NC history.

Click to view larger. Source 

Sanborn Maps are highly detailed, historical maps of U.S. cities and towns created between 1867 and the mid-20th century. They were originally published by the Sanborn Map Company to help insurance agents determine fire hazards and calculate property insurance costs. They are highly valued by historians, urban planners, and genealogists because they provide a hyper-accurate, year-by-year visual record of how neighborhoods and buildings evolved. They do not contain names, but when used alongside a census from a close year, they can reveal an ancestor's home or business if the streets and crossings are carefully noted. This extract of a Sanborn Map shows a portion of Fayetteville Street near the Capitol in 1884. 

View full image here at UNC Digital Collections

County subscription maps are another type of map that may be seen as less official,  but they are certainly not less useful. County maps record landowners' names, natural features, roads, and railroads. The Fendol Bevers Map of Wake County drawn for the 1870 Census is a great example of this kind of map.

Fendol Bevers Map of Wake County 1870.
This copy held by ECU. Link to view land owner names.

If you are lucky enough to find a map as richly detailed as the Fendol Bevers map for your research subject, you have struck gold. It is one thing to say your ancestor was from Wake County. It is another entirely to say he lived in St Matthews township near Griffice's Mill along Battle Bridge Road (see close-up below). 

A small close-up showing naming pattern.
Click image to view larger.

Once you have a map with this level of detail in your collection, you can cross-reference the information on it with many other documents to pin down the location of your ancestor. You can use it with census records, deeds, surveys, letters and more to home in on and support these details. Once you gather enough information from census records and deeds regarding location names and neighbors, you can leverage your FAN club research to find the location on the map. By looking at the FAN club group members and how they interacted, you may just solve your brick wall mystery. 

This can work for you even if your ancestor was not a landowner. Here is an example of an early ancestor that was not a landowner and did not leave enough direct evidence to document his complete family relationships. Indirect evidence was required to build a case for the family connections. 

The illustration below is a slide that was created for the Jesse Harris, Revolutionary War Patriot presentation. Jesse the Patriot was sick and destitute at the end of his life, so he did not leave a will that spelled out all his kin. He and his wife did leave a lengthy Revolutionary War pension file containing lots of details and a large FAN Club. 

Connecting him with his son and grandson (both named Jesse) required using maps and other documents to make the connections that supported the family structure. To keep the men straight, each has the birth year appended to their name. Each man was represented by a color and the records defined the size and shape of the rectangle representing the locations where they lived, worked and interacted.

Slide from Jesse Harris, Revolutionary War Patriot
click image to view larger

The three Jesse Harrises and their FAN club consisting of landlords, wittnesses, and employers produced a footprint that we can trace across northwestern Wake County on the Fendol Bevers map mentioned earlier. The side bar shows the types of records that were used to create this overlapping view of their lives. Try this approach with one of your ancestors! You will be surprised what you might learn.

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