Maps are every genealogist’s friend.  When you understand where your ancestor’s lived, their proximity to towns, villages and others around them, it helps reveal those elusive details that we all hope to uncover.

Sometimes, however, mapping is an absolute necessity, as in the case of identifying when and where my 3x great grandparents, John Mayel Simpson and Charlotte Mary [Bornan?], married and who their parents are.

Complicating things in this research:

• I’m not sure of Charlotte Mary’s last name.  I believe it is probably Bowman/ Boman/ Bower or similar, and simply transcribed wrong when a distant cousin typed up old handwritten family records dating back to 1880. 
• It is a strong possibility that the Simpson, Sisco, Bowman/Bornan, Wilson and Hadlock families intermarried for several generations in three states:  New Hampshire, Vermont and New York.
• I have no idea who the parents of Charlotte Mary or John Mayel Simpson are.  Through researching autosomal DNA matches I’ve found John’s family was located in Rockingham and Merrmack Counties in New Hampshire in the early 18^th Century, and at some point he (or his parents prior to his birth) migrated to Vermont. 

To keep myself on track, I’ve formulated my research question:  Are any of the Simpson families in the 1810-1840 censuses located in Orange County, Vermont and in Caledonia County, Vermont in the immediate family of John Mayel Simpson?

I’d already been keeping a spreadsheet of my Simpson family and other suspected/ potential family members in Excel.  That was helpful but quickly became unwieldy with multiple census years and locations to sort through.  Adding to the challenge was lack of familiarity with the locations, so just seeing the name  of a town or county wasn’t particularly helpful – I was constantly having to look them up on a map.

So it occurred to me to use pencil and paper (okay, iPad and Apple pencil) to try and diagram the various places and years that the families appeared in the 1790-1840 censuses, my targeted period of research.  My results were far less than satisfactory, and thus began a search for an online tool that would do the same thing but provide ability to filter by surname, year and location. 

Soooooo…..let me introduce to you Maptive!  It’s my favorite of the online apps I checked into, but there are many others that do the same thing.  With Maptive and others, you enter your data on the spreadsheet and can either upload the Excel file into Maptive or copy/paste the data into their data entry window.  In just seconds you have a visual representation of places, and if you select time periods (for example, the individual years for the 1790-1840 censuses), it will allow you to see proximity of families near each other.

Above you can see the census data imported from an Excel spreadsheet for the Simpson, Sisco, Bowman/Boman and similar families.  Each census year is color coded.  This is cluttered and not terribly helpful, so I utilize the filters to whittle down to the area of interest.

I can either group the data or filter it. Below is the data filtered for the state of Vermont, years 1810-1830 and set to display only Simpson and Bowmen/ Bomen and families with a similar surname.

I’m looking specifically for families residing in and around Barnet, Caledonia County, Vermont, where my 2x great grandfather, George W. Simpson, was reportedly born in 1824.  My guess is he was actually born near there in either Bradford, Orange County, or Sheffield, Caledonia County.  Both locations are approximately 30 miles away from Barnet, with Sheffield to the north and Bradford to the south. 

Now, having loaded my spreadsheet to Maptive, I can easily visualize who was nearby during specific census years, and how closely the families lived in the various counties and towns.

The map above shows the Simpson families depicted by markers with an orange circle at the base, while Bowan/Boman, etc. have red circles surrounding them.  On the far left is a marker with both red and orange, denoting the pin represents both surnames.

Clicking on a marker shows the data it represents in a pop-up window.  The marker I clicked has four entries in that location, depicted by “1 of 4” in the upper right corner, and looking at the orange dot to the left.

If I want to see the census for Joseph Simpson for the year this dot represents (1820), I only need to click the “Go to Website” link and I’ll be taken to the census page:

There’s also a nifty view so you can see all the names represented by markers in the current window.  These are displayed in the right-hand window.

Clicking on the “View Details” will also prompt the pop-up window.

There are many, many features this application offers that I have yet to explore.  (I finished my data upload at 3am this morning!). However, just having this visual has given me ideas for persons of interest, and my plan is now to work from Barnet outward, researching each Simpson and Bornan/Bowman/Boman in the area for links to John Mayel and Charlotte Mary ( ) Simpson

While Maptive is what I’ve chosen to use, there are many others available online if this one doesn’t suit your fancy.  There is a free account option that allows for maps with up to 250 locations/addresses or geo-codes. (The subscription fee priced at $1250 annually is really designed for corporations or similar power users and not those of us doing personal projects.) However, I found this one very easy to use with a nice user interface and easy ability to manipulate, add or replace the underlying data. 

Now, maybe one day Ancestry.com or FamilySearch will create a similar tool, or someone will come up with a third-party application that will extract census data for specific surnames/regions and populate it on a map?  One can wish…..

In the meantime, I’m off to research those Simpsons and Bowmans in Vermont and hoping for more info on the elusive John Mayel and Charlotte M. (what’s her maiden name?) Simpson!