Genealogy Research with Maps: PLACE OF ORIGIN

The world described, or, A new and correct sett of maps : shewing the kingdoms and states in all the known parts of the earth, with the principal cities, and most considerable towns in the world ... / ... by Herman Moll, geographer ...1736

Up until the 1880s, the largest groups of immigrants to the United States came from Germany, Ireland, and Great Britain, though significant numbers came from Scandinavian, and other Northern and Western European countries. Those places are represented in historical maps in NYPL collections.

Carte Nouvelle des Royaumes de Galizie et Lodomerie, avec le District de Bukowine (NYPL Digital Collections).

From the 1880s to the 1920s, most migrants came from Southern and Eastern Europe, Southern Italy, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Many Russian Jews immigrating to the United States came from Galicia, described here on a map from 1701, a region that straddled modern-day Poland and Ukraine. Galicia, like the Pale of Settlement, is a region not usually described on modern maps.

Townland survey of the counties of Ireland : maps published on the scale of six inches to a mile Vol.31, sheet 5, detail

A Civil War veteran, Bernard Trainor (1816-1868) lived in New York City, where he enlisted in the 69th Infantry regiment, NY, perhaps better known as the Fighting Irish. An abstract from the 69th muster roll records his place of birth as Strabane, Co. Tyrone, Ireland. In Ireland, very few census records for the 19th century survive. In the absence of written records, a detailed map helps fill the gap in the story of Bernard Trainor's life. The clipping shown above, from volume 31, sheet 5 of the Townland survey of the counties of Ireland: maps published on the scale of six inches to a mile / engraved at the Ordnance Survey office (1832-1911) describes Strabane around the time the veteran would have left for the United States, and is a vivid link to his place of origin.

Amsterdam: Includes translation of terms, illus. showing a comparison of the principal buildings of Amsterdam and an inset "Plan of the environs of Amsterdam" / W.B. Clarke [London] Baldwin & Cradock, 1835. Courtesy of Harvard Geospatial Library.

W.B. Clarke’s  map of Amsterdam shows the city in 1835. This is a good example of a map that works well with a census record, in this case the Amsterdam Civil Register of 1851-3. The register lists widower Moses Hamel, born 1814, and his children: Israel, born 1842; Betje, born 1844; Jacob, born 1846; and Naatje, born 1851. They live on Uilenburgerstraat, in the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam known in Dutch as the Jodenbuurt, and we see the street in Clarke’s map.

During the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II, most Jewish residents of the city were removed from their homes and sent to concentration camps. Of the 80,000 people who lived in the city before the war, only 5,000 were living at the time of liberation in 1945. Many of the buildings in the Jodenburt were abandoned and became derelict, swept away during the re-development of Amsterdam in the mid 1970s, so now the area is very different. Clarke’s map survives as one record of the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam before the Holocaust.

NYPL map collections describe immigration to the United States, and the routes and methods of transport our ancestors took to get to where they settled. There are maps that describe transatlantic shipping routes, cross-country trails and wagon routes, canals, railroads, roads built for automobiles, and airline flight paths. There are maps of the Underground Railroad, maps that chart the Great Migrations of African-Americans in the 20th century, travelers' guides, maps that record migration and maps that were designed to encourage migration to the United States.

Reduced map of the state of California compiled expressly for the Immigration Association of California, 1854 (NYPL Digital Collections)