From a map maker in the Black Country, for anyone choosing a gift that is really about time together.
This page is about how a personal heritage map can be part of a tool kit to help someone experiencing dementia to act as a visual memory aid into their past. I want to be clear about what it honestly can and cannot do, and how to choose one if you decide it would be helpful to your loved one.
The old memories are the strongest in all of us. The years when we are young, walking the same streets to school, our childhood home, our favourite haunting grounds of our youth. These memories are the hardest for age and natural decline to take from us.
People who spend their lives caring for someone with dementia learn to work with that, never against it. To meet the person in the time and place their memory has taken them, rather than pulling them back to ours is a kind instinct. In later life I hope that is where I go in my mind and I find contentment waiting for me.
A photograph shows one moment. A map holds the whole neighbourhood at once, and an old map holds it as it was in our earlier lives. The footpath that is now a road or a field that is now an estate. Or just the general growth of a small hamlet into a village. For older people the old maps look very familiar, half forgotten stories are right there waiting to be told with the right visual trigger.
A personal map hangs on the wall quietly being 1965, and lets the inner child that experienced that time visit when they want to.
“Alzheimer’s doesn’t take away memory; your memories are all in there. The part of the brain that’s damaged is the part that gives you access to memory.”
John Zeisel, sociologist and founder of the I’m Still Here Foundation, quoted by Carnegie Museum of Art, 2018.
I need to be absolutely clear, a carved map will not bring memory back and it will not slow anything down. I make no medical claims for my work.
What I have personally experienced is that a place someone knew for fifty years holds stories, and a carving of it on the wall gives those stories somewhere to start. Some days it will just be a nice thing to look at. Other days it may start your mum telling you something you have never heard in your life.
Whatever you end up choosing, a few things separate the gift that gets talked about from the one that gets put away.
Go back to their young years. Not where they live now, and not the place of their middle age. The streets they knew in their teens, twenties and thirties are where the deepest roots are. If you are not sure which place that is, ask about the old days and listen for the one that keeps coming up. That is the location. I can do the rest.
If they have moved, bring the old place to them. This matters most when someone has gone into a care home, or ended up far from where their life happened. A care home room starts as a blank wall in somebody else’s building. A map of their old streets says, to them and to everyone who walks in, this is who I am, ask me about it. Carers do ask.
Pick the everyday over the grand. The high street where the wages went, the walk to the school gates, the road to the works. Routine is where the memories live, not the landmarks.
These maps are to be touched. A carved map is wood, not glass. Following an old lane with a fingertip does something that looking alone does not. They give a texture to the memories.
Hang it where the chairs are. Next to where they sit with visitors, not in the hallway. In a care home, their own room, where every conversation starts.
The one most families choose for this, because it is theirs alone. Tell me where their life happened and roughly when, and I will go looking through the historical map records for the right source: the village they grew up in, the streets round the family home, the place they knew before the move. Carved into beech plywood, framed, made in my workshop in the Black Country, England.
£195, A2, framed, normally dispatched within 1 week of the design being agreed
For Black Country families: local high streets as they were in 1892, ready made. Brierley Hill, Dudley, Tipton, Cradley Heath, Halesowen and Amblecote.
£85, A2, framed
Delivery across the UK and Ireland.
