The GB1900 project used crowd-sourcing to transcribe all the place names and other text on the Second Edition County Series six-inch-to-one-mile maps covering the whole of Great Britain, published by the Ordnance Survey (OS) between 1888 and 1914 (GB1900 for short). The resulting data is available for download from the Vision of Britain website and can be searched on the National Library of Scotland maps website.

This website has been created as an alternative way to search a subset of the data, focusing on places which may be of interest to family historians. In particular, it should be easier to locate places with a common name e.g. Home Farm, Green Lane, Royal Oak or Rose Cottage. Currently only places in Staffordshire and Warwickshire are included, but I plan to expand coverage to all English counties.

How to use

I have assigned each place name or other text (hereinafter pin) to one of the historic counties of England. County boundary data came from The Historic Counties Trust and Wikishire.

Some pins near county borders may have been assigned to the wrong county, so try searching adjacent counties if you can't find an expected result. I have also assigned categories to pins, to enable searching for specific features. This is a work in progress.

When POTP is first opened, the search/filter box will be closed. This can be displayed at any time by clicking on Search/Filter at the top of the page.

Searching

• Search for:
• enter any text you want to search for. This is case insensitive, and punctuation will be ignored.
• Search area:
• England : this will search the entire database.
• map area : this will limit the search to the area of the map which is currently visible.
• county: restricts search by county. Multiple counties can be selected.

Filtering

Results can be restricted to pins which fall into certain categories, e.g. farms or workhouses. I have chosen a few categories which may be useful for local/family historians.

Map controls

• top left: zoom
• top right: show/hide
  • Historic OS map: this shows an historic one-inch-to-one-mile OS map as the background, instead of the modern OpenStreetMap
  • Map centre: this marks the centre of the map with a bullseye
  • Markers: this shows markers for search results
• bottom left: click search icon to search the visible map area. This will search and filter based on the search/filter box settings, but will ignore any county selection.
• bottom right: displays latitude, longitude, zoom level and county of the map centre

Link box

Larger scale historic OS map: links to an OS 25-inch-to-one-mile map at the National Library of Scotland maps website centred on the centre point of the current map and zoomed to the same level.
Town plan sheet index map: Selected towns have 1:500 OS maps available on the National Library of Scotland maps website. This link takes you to the index map for Town Plans, centred on the centre point of the current map.
Vision of Britain: links to the A Vision of Britain through Time website page for the centre of the map. Here you will find the parish and registration districts, boundary maps and much more.

Search results

Search results will be displayed in a list and as markers on the map. A maximum of 1000 results will be shown. Click on the bullseye icon next to any item in the list to centre the map on that pin. If there are many results, markers will be clustered. Zoom in, or click on a cluster to see individual markers. Clicking on any marker will popup a link to the 6-inch-to-one-mile historic OS map.

The results are shown as they appear in the original GB1900 data files (capitalisation, spelling, etc).

Example searches

1. Search for a specific place, e.g. Frog Hall in Warwickshire
1. Open the search/filter box. Enter Frog Hall in the search box. Select By county->Warwickshire as Search area.
2. Click Search. Markers showing all the Frog Halls in Warwickshire will appear.
2. Search for a road which no longer exists, e.g. Pigott Street in Birmingham
1. Centre the map on the Birmingham, by either
1. Searching for the placename, Birmingham
2. Zooming in on the map until Birmingham is shown
2. Open the search/filter box. Enter Pigott in the search box. Select Map area as Search area. Select Road filter.
3. Click Search. A marker showing where Pigott Street was will appear.
3. General search
1. Centre the map on the area you are interested in, by either
1. Searching for the placename, e.g. Alveston in Warwickshire
2. Zooming in on the map until the desired area is shown
2. Open the search/filter box, click Clear to clear search box and filter selections. Select Map area as Search area.
3. Click Search. Markers will appear on the map for all the pins in the map area.

Acknowledgements

The GB1900 Gazetteer was produced by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project at the University of Portsmouth, the GB1900 partners and volunteers. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike Licence CC-BY-SA. This dataset is made available by Vision of Britain which is operated by Great Britain Historical GIS Project, University of Portsmouth, one of the GB1900 project partners. The other GB1900 project partners are the National Library of Scotland, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies at the University of Wales, The National Library of Wales and The People's Collection Wales.