Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Mapping My Genealogy? How?


Mid-century city and road maps can be used to map your family's past.


There are many wonderful historical mapping sites online.  There are tools that help you overlay maps from the past to what is today's road and city boundaries.  All of them offer a unique and easy-to-find look at mapping your family's travels and past residences and in some types you can use the old boundary land grants to map out your ancestor's land as it would be today.

I have a large collection of old travel maps from the places our family visited.  It is fun to go back over those large city maps like one for Atlanta or New York City and see those cities they way they were when we visited in the 1960's through the 1990's. I have vacation maps for places like Sanibel Island or the Smokey Mountain parks.  Some from little towns that our ancestors lived in and we visited the relatives that still live there.

It is both a fun collection and very useful to document what was there at the time we visited. So many roads and towns are changed, even in the 20th century lots of place are no longer or the roads to and from them have changed.

If you don't happen to have any paper maps from your travels...here are some online sites you might like to try for mapping your ancestors.










Have some fun searching for your old places.  You may find the past is closer than your once thought it was.


















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