I have been looking at maps at the Origins website, a resource I had pretty much forgotten about. My rediscovery led me to try out their practical application, particularly when searching records at Origins.
Assuming you have already registered and downloaded the viewer, you can choose to look at the map of any county, including London, as well as street plans of 13 major cities.
The maps are in colour but the divisions delineated by the colours do not look familiar. What you see are the parliamentary divisions of each county for the election of members of Parliament at the time of publication, 1895. When the zoom tool is engaged, the visible details include place names, rivers, railways and, on the town plans, cemeteries. Very few place names in neighbouring counties show, only those very close to the county line.
Practical Application
Not all villages and hamlets are on these maps but all parishes are. The type font and size should not be used to decide what is or is not a parish. I looked at the map of Westmorland and noticed that more significant towns are in a larger and darker type but many parishes are in italics, looking the same as village names.
My first test was to look at the Atlas and Index of Parish Registers (C. Humphery-Smith, Phillimore, 2003) checking for names of all parishes adjacent to Warcop. They show on the Origins gazetteer map.
Next I went to the gazetteer at Genuki (: http://www.genuki.org.uk/contents/), input Warcop and specified that I wanted a list of places within 5 miles. There are three hamlets within the parish of Warcop, two of them show on the Origins map and one does not. The map indicates that Warcop is a large parish with parts on either side of the Eden River. It was easy to
estimate the location of the third hamlet because it is named in the Genuki Gazetteer list and is just about halfway to another place that does appear on the map. These distances allowed me to judge scale and distance on the online image.
I saved the map to my computer and then opened it. These are tif images so be sure to set your image viewer to open this type of file. Saving the image means it is ready for reference if you want to be able to refer to it at the same time you are searching the Origins databases.
There are no street indexes for the city maps so you will need to get your bearings from a landmark, such as the central railway station.
Clarity and Detail
I have no complaints about clarity. When using the zoom names on the maps are easy to read whether I am looking at a street plan or a county map. Villages are marked with clusters of dots representing buildings. Higher ground is marked with shading and hatching but this does not interfere with reading the details. Someone with knowledge of scales and mathematics would be able to explain whether scale is distorted in any way by online maps and their zoom tools. As long as you can find the distance between any two places on the
map you can make pretty good estimates, as explained earlier.
Conclusion
Quite often you want to move quickly from reading a search result to looking at a map that shows you where the place involved is located. I tried that out, when searching data at Origins using the map that I saved. It was open in my image viewer software, Origins was open in my browser, and in a second tab of Internet Explorer 7 I had the Genuki Gazetteer open, ready for checking distances. The gazetteer at Origins is one of many options for accessing maps to aid genealogical research. Most of us need several sources to tell us different types of information, such as boundaries or topography, or to show different amounts of detail. Atlases and detailed plans on large single sheets have been my usual choices, but I expect to make good use these from the Origins Library, particularly when I travel.