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“Why did Grandma always love maps and atlases?” I ask him one night as we clear the table after dinner.

“Well, her mother married a man called Elcock.” (From many past conversations with my grandpa, I’m not surprised that this story seems to (a) begin decades before I thought it did and (b) involve people I’ve never met.) “He was a bounder. A drunk. Betty remembers getting sent out to the bars to try to get him to come home.” He still refers to his wife in the present tense; he also sometimes slips and calls her “your mother,” a habit he must have fallen into while raising his three daughters.

“Betty’s mother divorced this man Elcock, then remarried him, then divorced him. After the divorce, her mother had to start working full-time. They moved a lot. One time when we were in Salt Lake City, we drove around all afternoon looking at all the places where she’d lived. I remember four, five, six of them. During the summer, she and Teddy”—that’s Grandma’s younger sister, my great-aunt—“were sent to live with relatives because her mother was working such long hours. They’d sit in the public library all day, and your mother would look at atlases.” That was where it all started, then: a turbulent home life and a welcoming library with pages and pages of beautiful maps. Werner Muensterberger, who wrote about antique maps in his book Collecting: An Unruly Passion, has noticed that map lovers often seem to come from broken homes (like Grandma’s) or families that moved around a lot (like mine). Maps give us a sense of place and stability and origin that we otherwise lack.

“She was smart as a whip,” he says ruefully. “That was her great disappointment, never finishing school.”

“Did she still like to look at maps when you were married?”

“Well, she believed in history. In the 1960s she started attending genealogy seminars, and you couldn’t do genealogy without telling the history of a town or an area. Hanging over my bed—her bed—is a National Geographic map of New England. She traced her family all the way back to colonial days and then back to England. I still have the map. I haven’t moved a lot of her stuff.” He pauses to think. “Maybe I should, but I haven’t done it.”

I like the notion that I come from a long heritage of maps, that I belong in a long line of keepers of the flame, like a cartographic version of the Knights Templar. I know from my grandma’s years of genealogy work that her family was descended from the Mormon pioneers who settled Utah beginning in 1847. This means, I suppose, that I wouldn’t even exist without those great nineteenth-century maps of the West that I glimpsed in the Library of Congress. Without the maps of one Charles Preuss, the German-born cartographer for John C. Frémont’s expeditions, Brigham Young would never have made it to the Great Salt Lake.

But I’ve been worried of late that I might not have passed along my map genes in robust enough fashion. My own kids, despite adopting a new all-consuming obsession every week or so, have never seemed too interested in maps. We bought them a wall-sized cloth U.S. map from FAO Schwarz a few Christmases ago and hung it in the playroom, but I’ve never seen them spend much time with it. At the moment, all the little Velcro pieces (landmarks and crops and whatnot) are randomly stuck onto the waters of the Gulf of Mexico—the only part of the map that my three-year-old can reach. They both love the GPS navigator in our car, but “Daniel” gives driving directions so well that you never have to look at a map—he’s the antimap, in many ways. Obviously my love for my children doesn’t depend on whether or not they know that Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the highest-altitude state capital or that Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan, has no traffic lights. But I remember how important maps were to me at their age, and I’d like to be able to share that joy again with them, now that I’m a cranky old geonerd instead of a starry-eyed young one.

I poke my head into Dylan’s room one night