Explore National Archives UK Domesday Map for Ancestral Towns

Explore 11th century England with National Archives UK new Domesday map. You can search by placename or postal code, or browse the map to find out whether your town had a place in the earliest surviving public record.

The new Domesday tool shows a map with those places mentioned in William the Conqueror's survey of England in 1086.

Visitors to the site can also download photographs from the early 20th century.

I gave this a try since my maternal grandparents were both born in England their lineage is solidly English. Some of the towns where my ancestors lived were Ramsgate, Chilham, Lenham, Pluckley, and more.

The search area for the maps was extremely slow to load but hopefully this is due to visitor interest and not the website itself. Using IE8, the map never loaded and did not display. A search for "Ramsgate" in IE8 had still not provided text results after 4 minutes, so I switched to Firefox.

Using Firefox the map displayed very quickly and a search for "Lenham" brought text results in 2 minutes. But searching for "Pluckley" hadn't displayed results even after 4 minutes of waiting.

I will try again and hope that the site is just busy this morning.