In my transcriptions of the 1783 Spanish census of St. Augustine, Florida, I'm learning a good bit about the place names around St. Augustine and around Jacksonville, where I grew up. One of these fascinating tidbits is that a watercourse known today as Julington Creek, in southern Duval County, was originally Julian Anton (or in some entries, Julia Anton) Creek. Now I want to find out who Julian (or Julia) Anton was.
There are other names which have intrigued me. There are three or four references I have found to a geographical feature called Public Point. I checked the St. Johns River charts and have found no such place today. The name may have been changed. Or the feature may have been eradicated when the Army Corps of Engineers, early in the 20th century, dredged a new, straighter channel for the St. Johns River, creating Blount Island, which is now a commercial port facility (at which I served in the Coast Guard as project officer to supervise a massive military hazardous-cargo loading evolution).
We have lots of small creeks branching off of the St. Johns River. Let me give you some point of reference. The St. Johns River varies from about half a mile wide to three to five miles wide in some places along its course. It is the only navigable river in the western hemisphere that flows north. What we call a creek around here, many people in other parts of the country call a river.
My husband, a Jacksonville native, and I, who moved here when I was 7 years old (a long time ago) grew up knowing about Pottsburg Creek and Pablo Creek and Six Mile Creek. All of these names appear on this 1783 census. Other geographical names we grew up with also turn out to be a lot older than we thought -- St. Johns Bluff, Talbot Island, Doctor's Lake, Fort George Island. There are others which we knew to be very old, dating from the time of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who founded St. Augustine in 1565. One of these is Matanzas, name of a river and a stretch of beach where Menéndez dispatched two crews of Frenchmen, including Jean Ribault.
And one place name I have already talked about. That is the swamp known today as Twelve Mile Swamp.
What place names are in your local area, or in the area where your ancestors lived? Is there any significance to these place names? Are they the same today as they were then? Take a look at your records which might mention place names, and see if you can track down their origins. Then check nautical charts, if these are waterways you are looking at, old maps (see if your library or genealogical society has some), and Google Earth.
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Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Maps to Follow Your Civil War Ancestors' Travels and Travails
I said in my introductory post last night that I plan to be "all over the map -- sometimes literally" in this blog. Today I am all over the map -- or the maps!
This afternoon my husband and I made the trip out to the Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island, east of the city of Jacksonville (though it's all Jacksonville, really) to hear Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean, associate professor of history at the University of North Florida, speak about his new book, Concise Historical Atlas of the U.S. Civil War.
First, a disclaimer. I am a History and Spanish major at the University of North Florida, and I have taken two courses from Dr. Sheehan-Dean. One was Craft of the Historian, an excellent course required of all history majors, in which we learn how history is done and why we do it that way, according to current standards of methodology. The other was Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Dr. Sheehan-Dean used many of the maps he developed for the book.
Enough prelim. What about the book, and what value does it have for family historians?
When we think about books of Civil War maps, we think of depictions of this or that campaign or battle, of where the troops were moving, of who was advancing and who retreating. Dr. Sheehan-Dean has a goodly assortment of those in this book, of course. However, he also has -- along with one-page explications which offer insight into what it is the map shows us -- maps of the territorial expansion of the U.S. from the original 13 colonies to 1853, agricultural production, distribution of industrial capability, movements of refugees, and patterns of dissent both north and south, and a great deal more.
The battle maps are clear and well-drawn. Dr. Sheehan-Dean did these maps himself, basing them on some of the original cartography done for the war and now available in the compilation of official records generally termed The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies put together by the U.S. War Department after the war and published in a huge multi-volume set. He used a geographical imaging software which allowed him to strip away "layers" of the maps (topography, roads and railroads, rivers, etc.) and thereby clarify what these often-cluttered old maps had to offer. He then used Adobe Illustrator to produce the final products. Many of the social-data maps, such as the agricultural production map or the map showing the distribution of industry, are so fine that individual counties within states can be easily discerned.
The descriptive material that accompanies each map is, in keeping with the book's title, concise, packing a lot of information into one page. But don't stop with what Dr. Sheehan-Dean says about the maps. He himself would ask that you think of ways to interpret their data and meaning which provide the best use to you. He calls these maps "open texts," that can be interpreted in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes.
We family historians can use the maps and interpret them in light of our own family experience. For instance, Dr. Sheehan-Dean's map number 30 shows dissent in both the north and the south. He discusses, among other factors, such events as northern draft riots and southern resistance to conscription, which many thought had a class bias as they saw wealthy planters either avoiding it altogether or being allowed to pay for substitutes.
To illustrate the value of this map to a family historian, application to my own family is relevant. Dr. Sheehan-Dean mentions strong Unionist feeling in eastern Tennessee in relation to this map. My mother's people, the Nave family, were mainly Union sympathizers in that part of Tennessee. Like most families in the area and many families across the land, they were divided on the subject. As I think of the family and look at this map, I wonder what lines of inquiry would bear fruit for me in finding out more about the Nave family and putting them in their proper context of time and space. Newspaper accounts, local histories, and other published accounts such as diaries might provide information. The Official Records Dr. Sheehan-Dean mentioned, and other government documents, might also have some background about Union sentiment in the area.
Did any of my Nave forbears serve in the Union forces? For them, I might want to research to see if there is a pension file or service record at the National Archives. Did any of them serve in the Confederate forces? For them, I might check with Tennessee's state archive, and possibly in other southern states nearby, as well.
All of this brainstorming represents what can be spurred by just looking at the map and reading the brief narrative, and thinking of other ways in which the map might be informative. Especially useful in limning our ancestors' lives is the fact that we can pinpoint in many of these maps the very county where the ancestor's family lived. That allows us to get an idea of the impact a particular factor may have had in our ancestor's life and that of his (or her) family.
Visualizing where our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers may have been, and what social, economic, and political forces would have been acting on them, can be of great value to our family history. I recommend that family historians take a look at where Dr. Sheehan-Dean's maps might take them.
Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. Concise Historical Atlas of the U.S. Civil War. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). $21.95
This afternoon my husband and I made the trip out to the Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island, east of the city of Jacksonville (though it's all Jacksonville, really) to hear Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean, associate professor of history at the University of North Florida, speak about his new book, Concise Historical Atlas of the U.S. Civil War.
First, a disclaimer. I am a History and Spanish major at the University of North Florida, and I have taken two courses from Dr. Sheehan-Dean. One was Craft of the Historian, an excellent course required of all history majors, in which we learn how history is done and why we do it that way, according to current standards of methodology. The other was Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Dr. Sheehan-Dean used many of the maps he developed for the book.
Enough prelim. What about the book, and what value does it have for family historians?
When we think about books of Civil War maps, we think of depictions of this or that campaign or battle, of where the troops were moving, of who was advancing and who retreating. Dr. Sheehan-Dean has a goodly assortment of those in this book, of course. However, he also has -- along with one-page explications which offer insight into what it is the map shows us -- maps of the territorial expansion of the U.S. from the original 13 colonies to 1853, agricultural production, distribution of industrial capability, movements of refugees, and patterns of dissent both north and south, and a great deal more.
The battle maps are clear and well-drawn. Dr. Sheehan-Dean did these maps himself, basing them on some of the original cartography done for the war and now available in the compilation of official records generally termed The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies put together by the U.S. War Department after the war and published in a huge multi-volume set. He used a geographical imaging software which allowed him to strip away "layers" of the maps (topography, roads and railroads, rivers, etc.) and thereby clarify what these often-cluttered old maps had to offer. He then used Adobe Illustrator to produce the final products. Many of the social-data maps, such as the agricultural production map or the map showing the distribution of industry, are so fine that individual counties within states can be easily discerned.
The descriptive material that accompanies each map is, in keeping with the book's title, concise, packing a lot of information into one page. But don't stop with what Dr. Sheehan-Dean says about the maps. He himself would ask that you think of ways to interpret their data and meaning which provide the best use to you. He calls these maps "open texts," that can be interpreted in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes.
We family historians can use the maps and interpret them in light of our own family experience. For instance, Dr. Sheehan-Dean's map number 30 shows dissent in both the north and the south. He discusses, among other factors, such events as northern draft riots and southern resistance to conscription, which many thought had a class bias as they saw wealthy planters either avoiding it altogether or being allowed to pay for substitutes.
To illustrate the value of this map to a family historian, application to my own family is relevant. Dr. Sheehan-Dean mentions strong Unionist feeling in eastern Tennessee in relation to this map. My mother's people, the Nave family, were mainly Union sympathizers in that part of Tennessee. Like most families in the area and many families across the land, they were divided on the subject. As I think of the family and look at this map, I wonder what lines of inquiry would bear fruit for me in finding out more about the Nave family and putting them in their proper context of time and space. Newspaper accounts, local histories, and other published accounts such as diaries might provide information. The Official Records Dr. Sheehan-Dean mentioned, and other government documents, might also have some background about Union sentiment in the area.
Did any of my Nave forbears serve in the Union forces? For them, I might want to research to see if there is a pension file or service record at the National Archives. Did any of them serve in the Confederate forces? For them, I might check with Tennessee's state archive, and possibly in other southern states nearby, as well.
All of this brainstorming represents what can be spurred by just looking at the map and reading the brief narrative, and thinking of other ways in which the map might be informative. Especially useful in limning our ancestors' lives is the fact that we can pinpoint in many of these maps the very county where the ancestor's family lived. That allows us to get an idea of the impact a particular factor may have had in our ancestor's life and that of his (or her) family.
Visualizing where our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers may have been, and what social, economic, and political forces would have been acting on them, can be of great value to our family history. I recommend that family historians take a look at where Dr. Sheehan-Dean's maps might take them.
Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. Concise Historical Atlas of the U.S. Civil War. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). $21.95
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