Week 39: Map It Out

     Do you have a family that moved around a lot? Have you ever wondered how close in proximity your family lines lived to each other? Are you trying to locate what possible church they would have attended? These are questions I have asked myself when it came to my family. And the only way to answer them was to "Map It Out". That is this week's prompt for the 52 Ancestors Challenge.
     My family's roots are deep in St. Louis. I've traced the majority of the lines back to the time they immigrated. On my mom's side of the family, we have the Ilg Family, Buer Family, and the Helfrich Family. They all lived in the same area of St. Louis, the Carondelet area, from around the 1890s-1945. Some of them moved quite a bit but still remained in the Carondelet area. When I started documenting the addresses for all the families, I started noticing familiar names. So I started comparing the addresses on the maps and lo and behold, they were all within a few streets of each other for years. For some of them, I was having a hard time locating records, so I wanted to look at the churches they went to. Thanks to the advice from my Aunt Patty Fuchs, she told me if I knew their religion, look for the closest church to their residence that was the same religion. That led me to St. Boniface Catholic Church. Even though the church is closed, the St. Louis County Library headquarters had many records from them. I was able to find baptismal records, birth records, death records, and marriage records.
     As you can see from my examples, mapping out the addresses helped me answer the questions at the beginning of this post and many more. I learned a lot more about my family than I ever knew before. I even took the time to drive the area that they used to live in. Most of it has been redeveloped over the years, but there were some that were still original.
     I still wanted to take a map and plot the different addresses all together so I could actually visualize all the different residences along with places of employment, churches, and other important addresses. It was during this time, I came across a video put out by Family History Fanatics featuring Melissa Finley from Boundless Genealogy. She explained how you could use Google Maps to place points on the map to represent the different addresses. See the videos below:





Thanks to Melissa, I was able to create my own map. This was exactly what I was looking for. Now I have a visual to go with my research. Even though the area has changed, I was able to look at old maps to pinpoint the exact location. After going through all the addresses I had, verifying through census records and city directories along with other sources, I created my own map. It's not done yet, but here is the work in progress.

So have you taken the steps to map out your family's residences?