My knowledge of the geography of places where I do genealogy research has come on in leaps and bounds over the years of doing this, and I’m sure it will be the same for most of you too. There are places I’ve never even visited in real life, yet can visualise their location on the map, together with surrounding villages or parishes. When we come across a likely record in an unfamiliar place, we need to assess the probability of this being our person.  Finding the place is a village just two miles from the expected location adds weight to that possibility. It goes without saying that maps, old and new, become our friend, but I thought it would be interesting to think of how ‘geography for genealogists’ differs from the geographical needs of regular people just finding their way from A to B or planning to visit a new area.

Essentially, of course, we need to understand the geography not only as it is today, but also as it was at different periods through history. It’s almost as if we have to peel back the layers to get to the place as it was during our period of interest.

Knowing all the names that apply to a specific place
Historically, our towns and villages have been organised into different administrative levels. We need to know what these are – what they were called, the nature of the administrative level bearing that name, the historical period in which it operated, and why each one is sometimes the place-name used… but not always. It all boils down to different types of record and where they were created. These different types of places and administrative levels include:

• County
• Hundred / wapentake / rape
• Town or village
• District
• Parish
• Diocese
• Civil Registration District
• Poor Law Union
• Manor
• Another name grouping places together, such as ‘Upper Wharfedale’ or ‘Cinque Ports’, or in Yorkshire the three Ridings.

Some of these are more important as we progress our trees further back; others come into play in the nineteenth century.

I wrote about some of these different administrative levels in a couple of posts back in 2019, and how confusing it can be to find a death recorded in two apparently different places – the parish and the registration district – particularly when neither of these named places is the known abode of the deceased. When we understand the function of all these administrative levels, these apparent ‘discrepancies’ fall into place. Even so, if we’re working with a new, unfamiliar area, we’re likely to have a bit of researching to do before it will all fall into place.

• Click here for my post about Untangling places, parishes and Registration Districts
• Click here for my post about Finding Registration Districts and parishes.

Good sources of information around all this include:

• The UKBMD website, useful for helping you work out which Registration District your place of interest was in.
• GENUKI has listings and information about all parishes, arranged by county.
• FamilySearch Maps enables you to search for the parish on a map, to see other place names within the parish, to locate it in amongst adjacent parishes, and to see what ‘jurisdictions’ it fell within before or as at 1851, including the county, Registration District, diocese, Poor Law Union and others.
• You’ll find useful information on Wikipedia, for example a search for “high peak district wapentake” returned this page about Hundreds of Derbyshire.
• Also try FamilySearch Research Wiki, which you can access via the home page → Search → Research Wiki, or you can access simply by Googling “FamilySearch” and the name of a place you’re interested in. Using both methods, I searched for “Staffordshire”, and from there navigated to the parish of Kinver, which has a good selection of historical/geographical information about that parish.
• The Manorial Documents Register on the National Archives Discovery pages enables you to search for manors by name or within specific parishes.
• In addition to any old maps you can find, the National Library of Scotland Side by Side maps can really help you to pinpoint and understand where a specific place used to be.
• A Family History or Local History group’s website is likely to have other relevant information.
• And of course your search engine of choice.

Historic accent and dialect
An additional feature of ‘genealogical geography’ is that in a time when many people could not read and write, and even before that when rules for spelling were not as established as they are now, place names were written as they sounded, or as the scribe heard them. It can take much poring over online maps to work out what a placename was meant to be, or what we would call it today. It’s easier if you’re familiar with the local accent or dialect. One that had me stumped for years was ‘Aul Court Somersetshire’, recorded as grandfather’s place of origin on a Dade style baptism register in York. If it hadn’t been for a friend who used to live in this long-elusive and mysterious place, I would still not know that this is a reference to the parish of Walcot, today part of Bath. It does give us a bit of extra information though, about the person who gave this place-name to the clerk. She spoke with a Somerset accent with which the York-based clerk was unfamiliar.

Variations in information given about places
Sometimes our ancestors gave different information about key places on different records. Often, we can explain this by distance – and the same would apply today. If I lived in Tedburn St Mary, about 5 miles west of Exeter, and I was talking to someone in Exeter, I would say I lived in Tedburn St Mary. If I moved to Norwich and was asked where I was from, I might say ‘Exeter’. In other circumstances I might say ‘The West Country of England’.

It would have been just the same for our ancestors who migrated.

However, this doesn’t explain why a person I previously researched gave his place of origin variously as ‘Coneythorpe’, ‘Cowthorpe’, ‘Hopperton’, Ouseburn’ and ‘York’. Even if we accept York as the nearest big place and therefore more likely to be reported to a stranger, it still doesn’t explain why this person gave so many tiny places as his birthplace on different documents.

We have to be prepared to think out of the box!

Some places have disappeared
Sometimes the only geographical indication that a place ever existed is a lane bearing that name, and presumably once leading to it. The only modern day indication of a place of significance to one of my 6x great grandfathers is a Service Station bearing that name. On these occasions we may just have to take what we can and accept that our place of interest is ’round about here somewhere’.

Knowing the lay of the land
Going further back in time, knowledge of other geological features such as mountain ranges could be useful in indicating where networks are unlikely to extend. Conversely, historic places such as abbeys, and the trading routes once linked to them, or the land holdings of important families, might explain why people did turn up in unexpected places.

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Some of the above, of course, applies equally to local history, while the nature of the records we use means that some of the challenges are more prevalent for family historians. I’m sure you’ll be able to think of examples of all this from your own research, and perhaps other aspects of geography that have extra layers when researching our family histories. If you do, please do tell us about it in a comment.