Seeking ancestors of place

Nimue Brown

Sep 5

(Nimue)

One of the best tools you can get for working with ancestors of place (certainly in the UK) is an ordnance survey map. Failing that, any online map that shows a lot of details can help you with this, and there are all sorts of things that the more technologically minded folk can use on phones to help identify what's around.

I've always been fond of maps, and I get a lot out of siting down with physical ones to look at what's in the land. Ordnance survey maps are good for showing historical and prehistoric sites in the landscape. This is a great place to start if you want to get out and make physical connections with whatever is around you.

Maps are also an excellent source of place names, and place names can reveal a lot about the history of a site. 'Cester' at the end of a UK place name indicates a former Roman settlement. 'Bury' goes with hillforts. The language a place name derives from can tell you a lot about who was there in the past. Places may be named after activities that occurred in them. You can't always determine a lot from just the place name, but it can be an excellent jumping off point for finding out more of the history of a place.

What remains to us of history is only ever a tiny percentage of what was there in the past. Places are more likely to be named after famous white men who went there once, than after one of the workers who lived and died in the same place. (We have a King Street in Stroud). Conquerors erase the history of those who went before them, changing names and languages as they go. Famous events can dominate our sense of a place while we lose sight of the great mass of smaller events that may have been more important to people who actually lived in the landscape. I think this is especially true around historic battles, where the death of a prominent figure dominates our sense of a landscape, and we lose sight of all the quiet, ordinary lives lived out over hundreds of years.

We won't know the stories of most of the people who are our ancestors of place. It's good to take the time to think about them, to acknowledge them and to remember that they existed. History as a process erases more than it records. We can honour the unknown ancestors who have shaped the landscape, lived in it, died in it and whose influences we still feel even if we cannot know much of them as individuals.