Expert’s Choice
The National Library of Scotland’s Maps website
maps.nls.uk makes freely available more than 250,000 detailed images of historic maps. The geographic focus is Scotland, but with good coverage of Ordnance Survey maps of England and Wales too. For newcomers, the best place to start is the guide to using the website at maps.nls.uk/ guide and the related help videos at maps.nls.uk/
videos. We also have research guides for exploring topics such as houses, buildings and local history at maps.nls.uk/guides, and a site map at maps. nls.uk/site-map, while the latest online additions are highlighted at maps.nls.uk/additions/.
The easiest way of finding everything online for a particular place is through the ‘Map Finder – with Marker Pin’ view at maps.nls.uk/geo/find/marker. You can simply put a pin on your place of interest and maps are returned covering that location. You can then zoom in or use the gazetteer search to display more detailed maps. You can also filter the results by date range, or by map type (for example Ordnance Survey maps), or by a keyword.
The ‘Explore Georeferenced Maps’ view presents a set of maps ‘seamed’ together and aligned with their real-world locations: maps.nls.uk/geo/explore. The seamed map layers can be easily compared to other maps or satellite imagery with a transparency slider. The Ordnance Survey six-inch and 25-inch maps (1850s–1960s) are often best for family history purposes, showing the detail of things like houses, places of worship, industries, hospitals and poorhouses. There are related viewers for displaying maps side by side at
maps.nls.uk/geo/ explore/side-by-side and for drawing and tracing features at
maps.nls.uk/geo/ explore/print.