Basics on placenames, gazetteers, maps etc
Overview
Atlases, gazetteers and maps are important for family research. They help identify places and show associations with other places. Historical atlases and maps may reveal that places no longer linked by made roads were once linked by a coach route. Other places owed their existence to the establishment of the overland telegraph. The coming of the railway may have led to the decline of once important towns and the expansion of a hamlet nearby e.g. NSW's Berrima and Mittagong.
Some places have changed their names - e.g. in NSW, Germanton changed to Holbrook during World War I. Don't be misled by parish names - localities may bear no relation to similarly named parishes. For example, the parish of Castlereagh NSW is not in the district of Castlereagh; Bathurst parish is not in the District of Bathurst; and the Colo River does not flow near the Parish of South Colah, often mis-spelt Colo. Locality names can also move, as indicated by these NSW examples: Pennant Hills Wharf is at Ermington, and Michael Connor's farm at Hunters Hill is actually at Thornleigh.
In these various cases, or if a place name is illegible, mis-spelt or unknown to you, reference to the following sources should help.
Australia
Gazetteers
If you are unsure of place names, the most comprehensive source to check first is the Australia 1:250,000 Gazetteer (SAG ref: A8/40/2) which lists over 100,000 town, locality, property, creek, river names etc. It gives latitude and longitude which can be checked against suitable Australian atlases. Remember that a country locality may have disappeared and may only be recorded now by the name of a water bore or creek name.
If the name you are looking for does not appear in the above try using an historic gazetteer like the 1870 NSW Gazetteer (SAG ref: B8/40/1870) or Wells' Geographical Dictionary published in 1848 (SAG ref: A8/40/1848). The list in Government Schools in New South Wales 1848-1998 (B3/40/5) can also be useful. Examples of other sources are Sands Country Directory & Gazetteer 1881-2 (SAG ref: B8/1/1882), Wrights Gazetteer 1881-2 (SAG ref: A8/9/1882) and Halls Gazetteer 1900 (SAG ref: B8/2/1900).
Another useful volume for NSW research is Jean McNaught's Family history research gazetteer: the approximate present location of early property names & places relevant to the microfilm records of land leases, grants & purchases, also depasturing & publicans licences, 1792-1865 (SAG ref: B8/40/4)
Atlases
We hold a copy of Sydney Takes Shape (SAG ref: B8/42/1), a collection of facsimile maps from 1788 to 1901. The earliest of these maps is a 1788 sketch of Sydney Cove while the later maps show streets and roads in suburbs between the coast and Five Dock. For country regions in the 1870s we hold a copy of Atlas of the Settled Counties of NSW (SAG ref: ZB8/42). The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (SAG ref: A3/4/5 and on CD-ROM) was published to celebrate the centenary in 1888 and contains information on various town as well as contemporary maps. Important for placing your ancestral area in an appropriate historical context are two historical atlases: Australia, a Historical Atlas (SAG ref: A3/1/61) and The Atlas of Australian History (SAG ref: A3/1/138).
Maps and plans
SAG's collection of maps and plans form part of our Primary Records collection. The collection mainly consists of county and parish maps, locality maps and subdivision maps. One important source for people researching the city of Sydney is Percy Dove's Plans of Sydney 1880 (SAG ref: 16/249), which show all allotments and buildings on them. A similar, but earlier source are the Sewerage Plans for Sydney 1856 & 1867 (SAG ref: 4/19432). For Sydney and suburbs in the 20th century there are a number of Street Directories dating from the mid-1920s (SAG ref: B8/44). All these can be cross-checked with the information obtained from our collection of directories.
Placename history and derivation
Most local histories indicate the derivation and history of placenames in the local area. For books specialising in the derivation and history of placenames, see for instance Place names of Australia by A W Reed, 1973 (SAG ref: A8/412) and Place-names of New South Wales: their origins and meanings, by A W Reed, 1969 (SAG ref: B8/41/2).
Placenames
The web has a number of excellent resources to enable you to identify places named in birth certificates and other records that you come across in the course of your research. Printed resources remain useful, but for finding a place or a map of it and the surrounding area, the web is often hard to beat!
Geoscience Australia maintains a national placename search facility covering about 310,000 current placenames across Australia, including homesteads etc. Clicking on a likely hit indicates the position on a large scale map.
However, the data in this source is merely a subset of data maintained by the various Commonwealth and State agencies responsible for maintaining geographical names. Links from the Geoscience Australia site to the relevant agency may provide further information, such as name derivation, and other names, including road names, historical names etc.
Macquarie University's Australian National Place Names Survey project will eventually be a more useful resource but currently has no database on-line.
Current maps
A good general source for current maps of places in Australia is www.street-directory.com.au, with the level of detail down to street level in many places. For searchable town maps of over 500 Australian towns, visit the ARTA site.
Historical maps
New South Wales - The Parish Map Preservation Project provides online digital images of 35,000 valuable old maps - parish and pastoral maps dating from the mid-1800s included. This is an excellent resource and allows downloading colour images 640x480 pixels.
Local information and history
Fairfax's Walkabout site has tourist and historical information available on about 1500 Australian regions and towns. Also well worth a look is Susie Zada's site, which specialises in links to local histories and historical sources.
United Kingdom
To find UK parishes and adjacent parishes, there's an excellent freeware program called ParLoc which you can download and install on your computer. It includes a database of about 25,000 placenames, including Ordnance Survey map references. It also provides a list of nearby parishes and can display these on a map showing their location relative to the target parish. An excellent resource!
For UK places, the Ordnance Survey's Get-a-map service provides good modern-day maps, searchable by placename, postcode or grid reference, down to a scale of 1:250,000. For smaller places, www.gazetteer.co.uk/ can be a useful adjunct.
Of course, not all villages of the 18th century have survived to the present day. And even for those that have, it's useful to have a source that provides a gazetteer and maps of yesteryear. For the UK, it's hard to go past www.old-maps.co.uk, which provides maps from the mid-19th century. Having identified your area of interest it's possible to buy online a paper or email copy of that area, at a scale of 1:10,560 (6 inches per mile) or even 1:2,500 (about 25 inches per mile). If you haven't got an A3 printer, see your local print shop and they'll probably be able to print an email copy as large as you'd like!
To find out more about modern-day villages, visit www.ukvillages.co.uk where you'll find details of 27,500 villages across the UK, supported by a good search facility. Each page provides links to local accommodation and other businesses; maps - including 19th century and aerial maps of the area; how to get there - including routefinders and timetables; and links to nearby villages, to any local groups or societies, and much besides.
One of the complicating factors in locating places in the UK is the way in which county boundaries have changed over the years - in particular, the major changes of 1974. For UK maps showing county boundaries before and after 1974, click here. More detailed maps of boundary changes can sometimes be found for particular counties - for instance, this one for Surrey, is readily found by a number of search engines, using "surrey county boundary changes" as a search term.
For street maps within UK, try www.streetmap.co.uk, which is searchable by postcode, street/placename and grid reference.
For Greenwood's 1827 map of London, go to www.bathspa.ac.uk/greenwood/. But if you want to browse the map, be prepared for long downloads - the files total 80MB! However, the navigation tools are good and if you know what you're looking for, getting it is pretty quick. Also in London, don't overlook Charles Booth's 1898/9 London poverty maps, at http://booth.lse.ac.uk.
If you don't need a gazetteer but want an old - some pre-19th century - map of your area of ancestral interest, the Bodleian Library map room has a range online.
County maps showing parish boundaries
The definitive text on this subject is the Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers, by Cecil Humphery-Smith [SAG ref: M2/10/63], which contains maps for each county of England, Scotland & Wales, showing the pre-1832 parochial boundaries, colour coded probate jurisdictions, and the starting dates of the surviving parish registers. Facing each parish map is an appropriate topographical map. The index lists the parishes with grid references to the county maps and indicates the present whereabouts of original and copies and whether or not a parish is included in one or other of such indexes as Boyd's, Pallot and the International Genealogical Index.
Gazetteers
For UK places in the 19th century start with Gazetteer of the British Isles published by John Bartholomew and known as Bartholomew's Gazetteer, 9th edition 1943, reprinted 1970 with summary of 1961 census data (SAG ref: M8/40/3). This book is important for two main reasons. It lists towns, villages, cities etc and provides the name of the pre-1974 county in which that place was located. Secondly it covers England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (Eire) in the one volume.
Another valuable publication is Lewis's Topographical Dictionary. This covers England (SAG ref N8/40/3a-3e), Scotland (P8/40/1a-b), Wales (Q8/40/1a-1b) and Ireland (S8/40/1a-1c). They describe every town and village in the country, giving brief historical details of each. They also state whether a place is a parish in its own right or, if not, in which parish it lies.
Elsewhere
The Global Gazetteer provides an index to about 2.9 million placenames worldwide. If you know the name of the country the place is in, this is where you can find its latitude, longitude and altitude. There are links to a topographic map of the area, and links to nearby places, but no map showing them in relation to each other. There are also links to other web sites and images relevant to the place. The coverage is wide enough to identify most present-day small villages in (e.g.) the United Kingdom and Ireland.
A site with world coverage that does show places and connecting roads is www.mapquest.com/maps/, but the maps show no detail other than roads and there are often better sites to be found at country level, e.g. the Ordnance Survey site mentioned above for the UK.