Borders and Boundaries

Photo by lilartsy on Unsplash

Hope the new year has been treating you well. With the snowy stormy weather, I’ve been indoors more. The weather imposes boundaries on us, so I thought we’d talk about borders and boundaries when doing family history research. Let’s look.

Today state lines are a given but one hundred plus years ago those lines were more fluid. Territories were large tracts of land that eventually would be divided up into states. When you begin researching in an area of the country that you’re not familiar with, you need to understand where those boundaries were at a given place and time. The very records you desire might be tucked away in a courthouse in the neighboring county.
 
If you are researching in Europe, you will need to take the time to look at the historical boundaries of a given area. In my case my Luxembourg ancestors didn’t move but the country boundaries did. Some of their records are in Luxembourg while others appear in German records from place along the present-day boundary between Luxembourg and Germany. In the last two hundred years these boundaries and countries were defined by whoever was in control. Whether it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the French with Napoleon’s reign, or the Holy Roman Empire. Borders can be political, geographical, religious, and historical.
 
Here are resources to help you discover borders and boundaries.

• United States County Boundary Changes • FamilySearch
• Germany Historical Geography • FamilySearch
• How Ireland's county boundaries define us (rte.ie)
• Changing country borders | Gapminder
• Maps, Atlases & Gazetteers | Ancestry®
• Geography Timeline: 13 Moments Changed U.S. Boundaries (thoughtco.com)
• Minnesota State Boundaries | MNopedia
• Best Historical Map Websites of 2021 (familytreemagazine.com)
• Home | Atlas of Historical County Boundaries Project (newberry.org)  This site is reviewed in the January/February 2022 edition of FamilyTreeMagazine

 
Here are books that focus on the changing borders and boundaries over time.

• The Family Tree Historical Atlas of Germany by James M Beidler
• The Family Tree Historical Maps Book – Europe: A Country by Country Atlas of European History, 1700s-1900s by Allison Dolan.
• Historical Atlas of Central Europe: Third Revised and Expanded Edition by Paul Robert Magocsi
• The Historical Atlas of the British Isles by Ian Barnes
• The Family Tree Historical Maps Book: A State-by-State Atlas of US History, 1790-1900 by Allison Dolan
• Mapping America: The Incredible Story and Stunning Hand -Colored Maps and Engravings that Created the United States by Jean-Pierre Isbouts and Neal Asbury
• A New Genealogical Atlas of Ireland, Second Edition by Brian Mitchell

 Remember that not all boundaries are political, some may be geographic with mountains defining a isolating a community from neighbors just mere miles away. Borders and boundaries can help us be more effective in researching our family, steering us to the right location for our record research. We can better understand our ancestors by understanding the borders that defined their life—whether those borders were political, geographical, religious, or historical. Happy searching!