Mapping Where They Met in the Middle

 

Maps, whether historic or modern versions instantly accessible online, are a wonderful addition to the toolbox we use to uncover the life details of our ancestors. Since I had had such good fortune using online maps to determine the feasibility of courtship connections for my father-in-law's Irish ancestors, I thought I'd turn to Google Maps once again to pinpoint the location of the towns in Poland where my paternal ancestors Thomas Puchała and Anastasia Zegarska once lived.

I had been amazed—and quite pleased—to discover that I could enter the name of a townland in Ireland and have it come up in the search results on Google Maps. If it worked for townlands in Ireland, it should work for obscure places everywhere else in the world, right?

Records I had found online for Thomas Puchała mentioned a town called Lubichowo. For Anastasia, I had found mention of a place now called Czarnylas. I plugged those two names into Google Maps, just to double check that they were within a reasonable distance for traveling by foot or even by horse. After all, it was unlikely, at the time they were married in 1868, that two people would even meet if the distance between their homes was prohibitively long.

The first result to my maps query, however, puzzled me. 

Even if they met in the middle, this trip of nearly 185 miles would take over thirty hours of walking for this potential couple. Hardly a reasonable commitment, even for star-crossed lovers.

I went back to my search terms to double check parameters. Looking back to entries at Wikipedia for each of the towns, I noticed the maps included coordinates for each location. This time, I returned to Google Maps and plugged in the coordinates I had found at Wikipedia, rather than entering the town names.

This result seemed more likely.

This time, Lubichowo and Czarnylas were a more reasonable hike of about two and a half hours, if one took the shortcut. If a couple met in the middle, they could arrive at their destination in little over one hour.

This, however, pointed out the obvious: Google Maps wasn't exactly wrong, per se, in outlining the first trip. As we find in more familiar territory back in our own country, sometimes there are two towns with the same name—maybe even within the same state. Frustrating, yes, but a reminder to ensure that when we research our family history, we've found the right town for the right ancestor, for surely, that other town might oblige us by featuring another search result with the very same names as the relatives we're seeking.

This little map-drawing experiment calls me to go back and double check my research on yet another detail. If there are two Polish towns with the same name, what if I've selected the wrong one? There's a reason for that question besides the unexpected results on this mapping experiment: the fact that, as the territory changed hands from one governmental entity to another, the names for the towns also changed. In this case, the revision was from the names the towns are called in Poland today to the German names imposed upon those locations during the Prussian rule. We need to go back and double check what we had found about that town of Czarnylas.

Above maps courtesy of Google Maps.