Description

Althea Douglas adores maps: she collects old maps, atlases, geography books, and books about maps. When the OGS challenged her to write this book, she jumped at the chance. Here is the glorious, full-colour result.

Genealogy, geography, and maps are inextricably entwined, particularly in a country like Canada where almost everyone has ancestors who came here from somewhere else. All family historians are travellers in time, and they should treat the past like a foreign country. Wherever you travel, maps are essential, particularly if you are looking for records.

In seeking immigrant ancestors – and even many Aboriginal Canadians will find a French coureur de bois or a Hudson’s Bay man from the Orkneys in their family trees – you will need maps. Not just maps of the place as it is today. You will also have to look for older maps that show former political divisions and place names; where old roads, canals, or railways once ran; and perhaps even research land ownership through manuscript maps.

Can you read a map? Did you hate geography in school? To be a successful family historian, you must learn to look at maps and extract the knowledge they offer.

In these pages you will find explanations of the vocabulary and accuracy of maps, how history changes place names, and how our ancestors saw the world. You’ll learn about the many sorts of maps and how to look at them; about gazet-teers, directories, street guides that provide supplementary information. You’ll exercise your historical imagination. And finally you’ll learn about how maps have been made over the centuries, the kinds of measurements once used, and what we really mean when we say “Canada.”

Althea Douglas, MA, CG(c), UE, was born in Moncton, educated in Toronto and Montreal, and now lives in Ottawa. She has written numerous articles on genealogy, Canadian local history and heritage conservation. Her other books for the OGS are Here be Dragons!, Help! I’ve Inherited an Attic Full of History, Tools of the Trade for Canadian Genealogy, and with her late husband, Creighton, Canadian Railway Records.