MAPS - Find the town of your ancestors on-line

I've had some success with this website so I thought I'd pass it on.

Alison Causton...

...

If you want to find the location of a town or a map of the area where
your ancestors lived try the link below.
Multimap.com - and it's free.
Click on your area of interest anywhere in the world or search by name.

michael lightfoot...

Multimap coverage of non-"western" countries is still patchy - try looking
for Wang Ngua, Thailand. The main street of my wife's home village (a
respectable bitumen road) is shown as a "cart track"!! OTOH, Streetmap
only covers the U.K., although they have links to some other sources
(including the unsatisfactory Whereis Australian maps.)

Overall, I use Streetmap for the U.K., multimap for many other sites and the
web-search stuff (maps and images) for things like New York.

One tip though - if you can find the name of a large town near your area
of interest you will have a better chance.
I'd suggest that you do a web search for your town first and see if
you can find the County, Parish or Municipal district that contains your
town along with the name of a larger town nearby.

I was trying to find Crockadreen in Fermanagh, Nth.Ireland the
birthplace of my great grandfather.
A search found nothing but I knew it was south of Fivemiletown and found
that town on a 1:100,000 road map using the name search.
Continuing to zoom to a scale of 1:50,000 a topographic map appeared
with contours,creeks, roads, houses and vegetation.
I moved to other maps around the area and to the south there was
Crockadreen and several other small townlands, Grogey and Curraghfad,
also connected with the family.

Alison Causton...

...

multimap.com is a fabulous resource for the reasons that you mention. A
footnote: these modern OS maps show many --but not all-- townlands.

I continued on and found Golan, Tyrone birthplace of my great
grandmother and Eglish, Armagh the birthplace of my GG grandfather.
I'd like to think that one of the little houses shown on the map was
where they lived.

To zoom in or out click on the bars above the map on the left or select
a scale from the dropdown list.
To pan across to the next map use the arrowhead symbols along the sides
and corners of the map.

The 1:50.000 map detail for the U.K. is pretty good - it may not be as
good elsewhere.

Hope you find where you are looking for.

Paul Blair...

I'd have to express an extreme dislike for those sites that give you a
mean little keyhole map, and this is one of those. Streetmap-uk does
well for that part of the world, but if you want a reasonable view of an
area, it's hard to go past web-search Map.