Find Your Ancestor's Home Using Google Maps

[Music] finding my ancestors homes using google maps is one of my favorite things to do i am always so excited when i find an address and even more excited when their home is still standing so in this video i'm going to show you how to find an address for one of your ancestors and then how to put that into google maps and see if their home is still standing so first of all before we start looking for a home we need to find their address so maybe you have an address that you already know where they lived or you can find it on sentence records on city directories on vital records obituaries okay military records there's just so many types of records that might have your ancestors address on so i'm going to show you a few examples and then i'm going to show you how i found those using google maps alright let's get started so first census records these are a great place to find an address for an ancestor in the united states in canada and the united kingdom these were kept every 10 years i'm not sure about census records everywhere else in the world and the the census records in the united states were pretty good about keeping an address also in the uk in canada it seems to depend on the census whether uh rather addresses were recorded so this is a census record for one of my ancestors who lived in utah and here it shows her address is 12 south you kind of have to look at the other one so this is 40 south 88 south and then third west so this first column here in the census is the street and then the first the second column is the house number so this is in lehi utah you would look at the top of the census to see what city or town it it is located in and so we can just start looking for this address 12 south third west in lehi utah so if you're familiar with addresses in utah third west would actually be 300 west okay so as you use google to look for those addresses sometimes you have to play around with it to find the right format okay so we're just going to type in her address it was 12 south and 300 oops 300 west and that was in lehi utah okay let's just hit enter and see if we get lucky okay so it automatically comes up with a street view here sometimes it's not the right house so i always like to make sure um see if i can see a house number on it or anything okay so this looks like it is a motel or apartment buildings or something so maybe their home got torn down but let's just take a look at the house's neighboring so this one here if you um scroll in or zoom in if you just scroll in with your mouse you should be able to zoom in and you can faintly see here on this column it says 2-4 so that is 24 south 300 west and her house was um 12. so i'm pretty sure that is the house beside it and she was on the corner but let's just make sure that we're ascending or descending the right way so if we zoom into this house beside that one it says 58 there so now we know that yes hers was probably torn down because she would have been right on the corner here um but even still we can kind of get and feel for where she lived you can look down the streets that house beside it is probably a similar style to what her house was like but it would have been here on this corner so sometimes that's how it is sometimes the home is not standing anymore it's very common especially if they live in a place that maybe when they first lived there they were in like the city center a lot of those homes have been torn down so that's unfortunate all right another place that is great to find addresses is vital records so this is a vital record for my ancestor from wales and it has their residence there but for any type of vital records they usually have some sort of residence or maybe it's even just the location of where the event happened okay so for this one since this is in wales um if you're familiar with whales a lot of the homes they just had a name so this i couldn't find the one for uh philip perry up here but i could find for ellen griffith it says that she lived at her residence at the time of her marriage was waterloo house in sarn mile turn i'm not welsh so i can't say that okay so now we can go ahead and look for that using google maps okay so now we'll put in a waterloo house and it was cern no i'm putting it in how it was spelled and this was in carnarvonshire which i know that it's a different county now but you can put that in sometimes you'll have to do a little digging if the borders have changed or whatever okay so when i click here it does come up with a place it says a cesaren post office but if you look at the address here it is a waterloo house so if we click on that street view we can take a look i'm not sure if that's the one but if we zoom over here look what this one says here let's zoom in a little bit this is waterloo house now i'm not completely certain that this is the same waterloo house um i'm not sure how i would know that for sure but i'm pretty sure that this is the right house so that is pretty cool now it is the post office not sure if it would have been the post office when my ancestor was living there um maybe they were living above it or whatever or maybe it just turned into the post office at some point and obviously you can do some more research to figure that out but that's just kind of cool to see the house that she probably lived in see what the street was like all these cute little houses and kind of see what the geography was like there so the third example i'm gonna show you today is a newspaper so this was for um my great great grandfather i believe um and this just shows that it was his his birthday so they were writing a newspaper article about him but it has his address right there in the newspaper so maybe your ancestors address wasn't kept in a census record or maybe you just want to see all the different types of addresses that they have or residences that they have you might be able to find their residence in an obituary or in like a marriage announcement or birth announcement or maybe they were just celebrating an anniversary and there's an article in there so here is has his address as 105 york street and it was in moncton new brunswick okay so we'll just go ahead and look for that in google maps okay so now we're gonna go to new brunswick 105 york street oops moncton okay let's click on that and see what comes here okay so now we got another street view this is what pops up initially but i want to find out if that is actually it okay so let's zoom in i don't see i can't really see a house number it might be behind that bush there so let's just look at the house beside it see if we can zoom in there okay oh there we go on that mailbox there it has a one zero one okay so we know we're on the right side of the street so let's see what the house is on the other side oh we went a little too far let's see here okay if we zoom in here we see a 109. okay so i'm pretty sure that that would be 105 then if it's between 109 and 101. so now we have this house here that is likely the residence of my great great grandfather which is very cool so you can see how that is so fun to be able to look up these addresses and see what their house would have been like what their neighbors houses would have been like these were all a very similar style there the four square houses um but then once you have that house if you want to save it you can always do use the snippet tool and and snip an image of that just when you save that you want to attribute it to google um but you can save that as a memory um upload it to family search or if you just want to save it as maybe you want to make a book of the houses of your ancestors so hopefully that gives you some ideas for how you can find addresses for your ancestors and then how you can look for them using google maps sometimes you'll need to do a little bit of research before you can find them on google maps maybe the locations have changed so you can always google search those to find out where those historical locations were so hopefully this has given you some more ideas for how you can use this in your family history to start connecting with your ancestors and learning more about them

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 9,900

Rating: 4.9656653 out of 5

Keywords: ancestral homes, google maps, getting started connecting with family, rootstech connect 2021, rootstech 2021, family history, family tree, genealogy research, finding your roots, genealogy tips, genealogy research tips, locate your ancestors, tips and, tips and tricks, familysearch, family search, how to do genealogy research, genealogy tips and techniques, genealogy tips for beginners, how to find family history for free, google earth, familysearch rootstech, homelands

Id: s28gjgHpZDs

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021