Today’s exciting find: a historical 103-year-old world map, hidden in Grandma’s steamship travel journal!

This 1922 antique world map (made by the George F. Cram company, Chicago; for Kiggins and Tooker CO, New York) reveals how far the British Empire and other ruling empires extended. (You can see the color-coding chart, bottom R on the map.)

The map also includes dashes showing steamship travel paths through the seas.

This helps me trace where Grandma’s ship sailed and stopped in 1926. The color-coding shows me who ruled the countries she passed through at that time (unless that changed shortly after the map was published.)

As a bonus, note also the solid lines marked in the seas, indicating submarine cable lines from World War 1.

(Later in this post you’ll see how the map unfolds from the journal.)

Sometimes I think my own home is a historical wonderland!

I have so many boxes of antique handwritten photos, letters, and other memorabilia, it’s easy to lose track of what I have. I joke that I came from a family of hoarders. But I DO relish items hoarded now for over a century which are now in my possession.

It’s a historical writer’s dream, right?

For the past year, I’ve searched for such a map online. In the meantime, I had this all along!

I’m finally working more earnestly on my narrative nonfiction book about the years Gladys Gose Pearce and John Kenneth Pearce lived in India (1923-1933.)

[My excuse for missing this map: I was temporarily derailed for a few years, assembling and editing a 1950s-1960s collection of vintage scifi short stories, written by yet another family member. See Gremmie’s Reef, now in print.]

It helps that I’ve now switched my office research piles from vintage science fiction manuscripts back to the India artifacts. So I now have more at my fingertips, including this travel journal.

Here’s how this antique world map physically unfolds:

When Gladys wrote in this journal, she’d just begun her steamship journey. It would last 51 days.

She noted that she boarded the S.S. President Garfield in San Francisco, California in August of 1926. She then had various stops in other countries and ship changes before finally landing in Madras, India to marry Grandpa Ken.

A bit of their romantic history:

Ken graduated from high school in Walla Walla, WA with Gladys in 1915. They then both attended the University of Washington in Seattle.

After college graduation, Gladys went to San Diego to teach.

In 1923, 25-year-old Ken (J. Kenneth Pearce) was sent to South India, to work as a Forest Engineer for the British Indian government.

In the fall of 1925, Ken got a short home leave to visit Washington State. He then proposed to Gladys. It was about time! For ten whole years they’d been close friends. But during that visit, sparks flew.

Gladys and Ken would live in India until 1933: first in South India, and later in the Andaman Islands.

The Andaman Islands

The Andamans are tiny specks on this world map, in the Bay of Bengal. The islands are east of the Indian mainland, near Burma (now Myanmar) and Siam (now Thailand.)

This particular map has the Americas in the center (being published in the USA.) So the R edge of this map shows the mainland of India, while the L edge has the Andaman Islands.

If you zoom in close you can see where Gladys put an arrow pointing to them. Seeing it on a globe or other-centered map might make it easier to visualize this.

Still, what a great find this is! I now have this map as my computer screensaver.

I’m sure the cartographers who drew it 103 years ago could have never imagined THAT.

What’s in your own attic, basement, or closet? What surprise about your own ancestors awaits you…or have you already found?

Please share your own discoveries in a comment, or email me via my Contact page. I’d love to hear from you.

Laurie