A searchable record MAP showing (Parish Records etc) - Missing records
In 1714 William leaves money to his 4 adult children. Although the family had lived in the same county for 100 years and continued there until 1798, there is no record of William's marriage and no christening records for the 4 children. Where are they hiding?
Idea: A zoomable navigable map (like a Phillimore Atlas) with searchable villages and parishes, where a list of relevant records pops up.
Record location: If the record lives somewhere else, a hint about where I might find it?
Why?: Quickly highlight nearby villages or parishes where the relevant records are burnt, nibbled, lost or just not currently available to Family Search for the likely period.
I am thinking of UK records, but the idea is probably readily applicable anywhere.
Many thanks.
Yours sincerely,
Charles Ingmire
Comments
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Research is all about using numerous ways and means of finding this kind of information. I wouldn't necessarily expect FamilySearch to provide this type of resource. If so, should they do this for the whole world? And what period of time would these maps be based on? Placenames have changed over the centuries, so villages around in one century might have become "lost" a couple of hundred years later.
There are many old parish maps for the different counties of England, on a variety of websites. I use these, together with Google Maps. I find the latter particularly useful in locating the distance between two surviving villages, then decide on the likelihood my relatives would have had a connection to one or the other, or both.
You have already mentioned Phillimore's Atlas, which is an excellent tool. For finding where records are held, I usually type in the name of a village / parish, followed by "GENUKI", and the search engine leads me to the information required. Otherwise, search on, say, "Lancashire Archives" and you will find their website, which at least has contact (telephone / email) details available, to use if you cannot confirm their holdings includes material for the area of your research.
I am not discouraging the implementation of your idea, but can see the difficulties - including the length of time to get such an feature up and running. So I believe you need to take advantage of the generally easily available options that are already in place, to meet most of your needs.
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Expanding a bit on Paul's comments, the trick to all research is knowing where to look stuff up. If you need someone's phone number, you try the phone book, not the atlas or encyclopedia, right? It's a similar situation with FamilySearch: it's a genealogical database and repository. Yes, its databases include one that's about places, and much of its image repository is filed more-or-less geographically, but FS is not a map service or gazetteer. You turn to FS after you've consulted the appropriate sources to find the jurisdictional information you need. I see little point in asking them to expend their limited resources on what amounts to adding phone numbers to the atlas.
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