Often in genealogy we are trying to “find our way home” in a rather poetic sense. It is the broad where-are-my-roots sense. “Home” is our ancestors’ names, ethnicities, religions, and cultures. In short “home” is everything that went into making our ancestors who they were and, in turn, might have contributed something into making us who we are.
Sometimes, though, that “home” we want to find is a much more concrete and specific thing. It really is the house where an ancestor once lived, the shop where an ancestor once sold cloth, or the land a family once farmed. It is a place that can be found on a map and visited. Standing on that spot, seeing that building, or picking up that soil, is also poetic.
A few weeks ago, I was asked about finding the site of a family farm in Sweden. The family owned it in the 1870s. Would it be possible to find the precise location so that it could be visited? Sometimes it is. I had already found the family in parish records for the 1870s and those told me the village. Land reform came to the area in the 1840s. The map produced for the reform gave me the boundaries of the village lands and the boundaries of the land holdings within the village but the parish records gave me no idea which of the many holdings was the one that was “home” in this case. The land reform protocol was over one hundred pages long but never mentioned the farmer I was looking for. It was written before he owned the land. The reform protocol was not going to help.
But the protocol did help. I found my farmer’s probate. It was very long for a Swedish probate record and part of the reason was that this man owned quite a bit of land beyond the land that he farmed himself. Each of his holdings was mentioned in the probate record and in order to describe the land, the name of the previous owner was given. Eventually, the name of that previous owner turned up in the protocol alongside the label used to indicate his land on the map. Overlaying, scaling and rotating the reform map on a modern satellite image gave the exact outline of the land in relation to modern roads. The land is still being farmed. The field boundaries on the map are the same ones that a satellite sees today. “Home” had been found.