This paper is concerned with the exploration of lineage in pre-twentieth century mapping taking Suffolk as an example. A non-parametric bidimensional regression (Tobler, 1994, Geographical Analysis, 26 186–212) is used to investigate patterns of distortion in seven maps of the county (Saxton: 1575, Jansson: 1646, Blome: 1673, Overton: 1713, Harrison: 1790, Rowe: 1831, and Wyld: 1891). For each map the locations of 50 towns and villages were digitised and are used to predict the position of the same 50 locations on 20C OS mapping. The residuals are used to interpolate a vector field for each map from which the OS grid may be warped to give a visual indication of distortion. Finally, a statistical comparison of the distortion is made using Akaike’s Information Criterion (Akaike, 1973, In B. Petrov, & F. Csaki, 2nd Symposium on Information Theory (pp. 267–281), Budapest: Akademiai Kiado). The results suggest that pre-nineteenth century map makers were heavily dependent on the work of their predecessors.