Brigitte L.
New Member
Hello all,
I hope you’ve all had a lovely Christmas and New Year.
I’ve never posted here before but I’ve browsed a lot and found a lot of helpful info whilst researching my family history, so I figured I’d see if anyone here is able to please offer me some guidance?
I’m currently researching my Norton family ancestors who, according to the 1901 census, lived at house 3, back of 266 Highgate Road, Balsall Heath, Birmingham. However, I’ve looked at a number of maps and have been unable to locate this house on any of them.
I’ll take you through my working-out process, as it were. Firstly, the only map I’ve ever been able to find of Birmingham that contains house numbers is “OS 1:1,250/1:2,500, 1944-1974” (not sure if I’m citing that correctly..) so that’s what I started with to get my bearings around the house numbering side of things. However, by the time this map was surveyed, no. 266 no longer seems to exist—it appears to have been demolished to make way for a bus depot (see screenshot below). In the screenshot you can see that the buildings either side of the depot are numbered 248 and 282 respectively, so the area in between should have contained no. 266 at some point.
So, the next map I looked at was “Birmingham and its Environs–Warwickshire XIV.9.25 Surv: 1888, Pub: 1889” (see second screenshot, below), which doesn’t contain house numbers but does show the buildings on Highgate Rd prior to the omnibus depot: you can see further houses in its place, as well as a Methodist chapel (which was listed as no. 278 on the 1901 census, so that matches with the above map nicely). However, even on this map it’s difficult to see where the “back-to-back” houses would be in this layout—at first I thought maybe where that long row of houses behind the chapel is (see red arrow on below screenshot), however, this is marked as “Albert Place” on the map, which is the address they would have used on the census, you’d imagine? Also, if you take nos. 248 and 282 on the 1940s map above and locate these on the 1889 map below (without numbers), and count the buildings between them, there aren’t enough buildings there to make up the difference in house numbers: I mapped them out on the below screenshot using purple for known addresses (as per the 1940s map and 1901 census) and blue to fill in the building numbers between, and there are just too few buildings, so that’s got me stumped.
I guess what I was wondering is if anyone here could help point me in the direction of a map that contains the houses at the back of no. 266 Highgate Road, and if anyone has another reliable map besides the 1940s–70s map that lists building numbers—that would also be greatly appreciated.
(After that my next step would be to find any historical photos I can of the address, but I understand I’d likely need to make a new thread for that, since this is in the Mapping section.)
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!
- Brigitte
I hope you’ve all had a lovely Christmas and New Year.
I’ve never posted here before but I’ve browsed a lot and found a lot of helpful info whilst researching my family history, so I figured I’d see if anyone here is able to please offer me some guidance?
I’m currently researching my Norton family ancestors who, according to the 1901 census, lived at house 3, back of 266 Highgate Road, Balsall Heath, Birmingham. However, I’ve looked at a number of maps and have been unable to locate this house on any of them.
I’ll take you through my working-out process, as it were. Firstly, the only map I’ve ever been able to find of Birmingham that contains house numbers is “OS 1:1,250/1:2,500, 1944-1974” (not sure if I’m citing that correctly..) so that’s what I started with to get my bearings around the house numbering side of things. However, by the time this map was surveyed, no. 266 no longer seems to exist—it appears to have been demolished to make way for a bus depot (see screenshot below). In the screenshot you can see that the buildings either side of the depot are numbered 248 and 282 respectively, so the area in between should have contained no. 266 at some point.
So, the next map I looked at was “Birmingham and its Environs–Warwickshire XIV.9.25 Surv: 1888, Pub: 1889” (see second screenshot, below), which doesn’t contain house numbers but does show the buildings on Highgate Rd prior to the omnibus depot: you can see further houses in its place, as well as a Methodist chapel (which was listed as no. 278 on the 1901 census, so that matches with the above map nicely). However, even on this map it’s difficult to see where the “back-to-back” houses would be in this layout—at first I thought maybe where that long row of houses behind the chapel is (see red arrow on below screenshot), however, this is marked as “Albert Place” on the map, which is the address they would have used on the census, you’d imagine? Also, if you take nos. 248 and 282 on the 1940s map above and locate these on the 1889 map below (without numbers), and count the buildings between them, there aren’t enough buildings there to make up the difference in house numbers: I mapped them out on the below screenshot using purple for known addresses (as per the 1940s map and 1901 census) and blue to fill in the building numbers between, and there are just too few buildings, so that’s got me stumped.
I guess what I was wondering is if anyone here could help point me in the direction of a map that contains the houses at the back of no. 266 Highgate Road, and if anyone has another reliable map besides the 1940s–70s map that lists building numbers—that would also be greatly appreciated.
(After that my next step would be to find any historical photos I can of the address, but I understand I’d likely need to make a new thread for that, since this is in the Mapping section.)
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!
- Brigitte
