Mappy Monday - Maryland Historical Properties

The Inventory of Historic Properties site by the Maryland Historical Trust contains detailed descriptions of historic properties in Maryland, including maps, family histories connected to the properties, and even ancestral photos in some cases.

My Maryland Sparks family owned a section of the land in Queen Anne's County known as Spaniard's Neck. I've seen references to the Sparks properties called Sparks Lot and Heath's Gift, so I was curious if I could find out more about them. In my first attempt, I typed "Spaniards Neck" into the search bar and got a hit! The only thing is that the search took me off of the site and the hit was in a Community Plan for 2009. Still, it was interesting to see that the Spaniard Neck name was still in use.

Map from Centreville, Maryland Community Plan 2009

I returned to the historic properties site and selected Queen Anne's from the "Search by County" page. I knew that the Sparks property was in or near Centreville, so I concentrated on ones in that area. There were several properties in the Spaniard Neck area, but the closest match to the names I was looking for was one called "Upper Heathworth". The document contained a map of the Spaniard Neck area with the location of the Upper Heathworth property and several photos of the property.

Upper Heathworth

There were several other properties in the Spaniard Neck area and also a mention of Sparks Mill Road in Centreville. I'll have to revisit this site when I have a bit more time to read some of the other histories. The documents I found on the site were pdf files that were made up of pages and photos that had been scanned in. There is a text search on the site, but it wasn't returning anything for me, maybe since the scanned pages aren't searchable. Despite the search limitations, the site is definitely worth a look if you have Maryland ancestors.