How to Find Old Maps for FREE at the DavidRumsey.com Website

[Music] good morning how are you so happy to have you here uh this is elevens is with lisa and i am lisa i'm lisa louise cook and so happy to have you here like i said um it is the week after thanksgiving and we had a lot of fun last week we're going to have a lot of fun today too we are going to be talking about how to find old maps and how to find them for free and when you think about genealogy i mean it's all about the location and the time frame of where your ancestors were and that gives you the context for everything doesn't it gives you the context for the records that you're trying to find and that you need and what's happening in the world around them and that's infecting the decisions they're making so this is a really critical stuff for your research so i'm happy you're here and let's jump right into it because we have lots to cover and then at the end i will uh take the questions from live chat and um share a couple things with you okay so old maps um that's what we're gonna talk about and of course on episode 12 we talked about google earth as you'll recall now this is the google earth software that's free and of course there you can find old maps if you go down in the layers panel we can turn on open the gallery click the box for rumsey historical maps they pop up those little gold medallions on the screen and when you click them you find these old map overlays with one click it automatically overlays right on to the modern day map it's kind of synchronized there they call it geo-referencing and these maps that are available in the um rumsey historical maps in the layers panel of google earth they're worldwide and of course as is when you're further out when you're up at satellite view you are um seeing a handful of these medallions but as you zoom in closer you're gonna find more and more in fact uh check this out we've got australia as well i know we have lots of australian viewers here at 11's with lisa so really need to know that these are free and there's about 120 150 of them available okay so you can also have your own old maps in the my places panel excuse me my places is uh let's see here oh the streaming's a little choppy probably it might be our internet we had a little choppiness this morning it might be yours you might try refreshing the screen if you're having trouble um so these are the maps that you can have in your own places panel so you can drag and drop the ramsay maps out of the gallery into the my places my places is your stuff nobody else can see that and we talk about this in detail in many chapters in my book the genealogist google toolbox i also have kind of a companion video tutorial series that teaches you about that as well and one of the things we talk about is um not only do you have the maps that you might be dragging and dropping out of the layers panel but you might want to bring your own maps into google earth and this is just one example of an old map that i had now this could be a photo a photocopy of a map it could be something out of book it could be a digital map from another website um this is an old plat map from an old county history and you can create your own overlays so while google earth provided some of them for us um that were already geo-referenced you can bring your own in right there with your ancestor's name on the plat map and you can geo-reference that as well any type of digital map this can be done with so that's um all in the book on how to do that and of course watch that episode 12 of 11 says to get more info just generally speaking on google earth but what if when you turn on the layers panel and you click the rumsey historical maps they just don't have a map in the area where you need it or maybe they do but they don't have them in the right time frame why you're here today because i'm going to give you the best strategies for finding free old maps and we're going to do that at davidrumsey.com now in the book i mentioned that these maps are all coming from the david ramsey website and david ramsey is a cartographer and uh he's in the san francisco bay area he now has a huge i don't know what you call a map museum at stanford university and they are now kind of sponsoring his efforts his collection spans about 150 000 old historic maps and so when google first uh obtained google earth they said we'd like they approached him and asked him to maybe contribute 120 150 maps that they could include um but he himself and his team were busy trying to also digitize his entire collection and you can imagine what a job that was well stan they've got stanford university behind them now and so they are past the 100 000 mark of digitizing that 150 000 map collection and i'm imagining being part of stanford now that they may be expanding that collection as well so he makes these readily available for free at his website and these now are not only being digitized but they're also geo-referencing them and that's key because you can do it yourself and you can download these maps from his website and and do it yourself like we talk about creating old map overlays and i think it's a really important skill to be able to overlay any map yourself so that no matter where you get it from you're able to create those but it's really nice that they do some of that work for you so i want to go and visit their website show you how to find these maps with stanford behind them now with all the backing this website has gotten a lot bigger and a lot more complicated and it's not as simple as it used to be to find the old maps that are digitized and available i know your first question is okay lisa but i get these old maps at ramsey historical maps and can i use them yes you can so first off at davidrumsey.com you can go to the about tab and click copyright you'll get the copyright and permission statement that they have and essentially i can summarize it for you for personal use you are free to use the maps commercial use is considered the reselling of reproductions of the maps which you can't do unless you get specific permission so most of these all fall under their creative commons license and they do let you know that maps that are after 1924 may have their own copyrights which the site doesn't have any control over so bottom line if you're using these for yourself you should have no problem at all and you can reference the copyright license information here on their website okay so um davidramsey.com so let's take a look at the home page this is one of the things that has hugely expanded and as you can see here they have this kind of running ticker at the bottom it's a good distraction but that's not the best way to be finding old maps so is as you scroll down the page you'll notice that they have this next section past the ticker you get to a couple of different key areas and some ways that they're categorizing these maps for you so let's look at this at the top we have that you can click through and you can it says browse a hundred thousand maps and images in the luna viewer so this is the the digitized maps they've done so far out of the entire collection you can look at those through the luna viewer we're going to be talking about that in just a minute how to use the viewer also it's kind of interesting is you can visit the ramsey map center at stanford university which is really amazing facility so you can check that out when you have a few minutes view maps recently added so as you kind of become skilled at making this one of your stops on a regular basis for your old maps you might want to go here as you've comb through what they currently have come back in a while and um you'll be able to jump right to what they do have now so they are constantly digitizing and constantly geo-referencing creating the overlays this will give you the updates down below now we've got popular collection categories so this is kind of a nice place to introduce yourself to get a feel for um kind of how they categorize the maps kind of what what areas and topics they fall into there's a lot of different things here some are going to be really useful for you for genealogy some maybe not so much i don't know if pictures of globes are going to help or they've got huge world maps and specialty maps but there's some here that i think very much so we can make great use of and depending on the life of your ancestor who knows maybe you need the maritime maps as you go down the page then you're going to see view three panoramas or original collections the original collection space so essentially this is where david had all of his collection in his private space i'm assuming maybe at home i don't know but it's kind of a neat panorama to show you where they came from originally and then you can visit the stanford facility as well you can also browse the list of collections um their entire list of atlases so these are interesting and some of these are just absolute works of art so you can put that on your rabbit hole list and there's also explore the geo-referencer we will be exploring the geo-referencer in just a few minutes as you come down further you can see that they do have a blog so if you want to you can subscribe to that you can see what the latest projects are that they're working on and a lot of times on the blog what they're doing is highlighting and featuring and telling you the background on a particular map that's just really unusual and unique or has a real historic significance that's always kind of an interesting read and below that you see their featured maps again they tend to feature the ones that are really globally of interest that are very unique that are artworthy um not a great place to be looking for ones specifically for your genealogy research the geo referencer not only is a tool to create overlays but within the ecosphere of david rumsey so you can create them here but this is not creating them for google earth so when we think of geo-referencing we think of creating overlays this will give you a tool within the david rumsey website but it's not necessarily translatable into google earth in terms of creating an overlay and then moving it over there so that's not the purpose of it and it's really also about um helping them geo-reference the collection just like people do indexing for family search if you decide that gosh you really like this and have a knack for it you might really enjoy helping them on a volunteer basis through the geo-referencer the map rank is the other major tool that we'll be talking about and this is again one of many ways that you can view the maps and it offers special features a little different than the luna viewer so let's recap all the different ways that you can view and find maps and then i'll show you what i think are the best ways and how to get them on your own computer so the luna viewer that is really accessed through the main search box at the top of the home page this is where you can browse and search for the hundred thousand digitized currently maps okay the geo referencer is that tool on the site where you can access the maps but you're doing it in order to take the maps that have not yet been georeferenced and put pinpoints on them so that they can be connected to the modern day map and in a sense create overlays and it gives you kind of a comparison tool which is kind of interesting so it's a it's a fun and unique tool to use on their website but it's not necessarily it's not creating overlays for google earth and let me just say and you might be wondering why would you want to create overlays in google earth when you can do it over at davidrumsey.com and my answer to that is is that i'm i like to be able to use a tool that i can use across my research and oftentimes if it even has application outside of genealogy all the better because it takes time and effort to learn how to use any tool right so we're already doing things like finding locations for our ancestors plotting out immigration paths making family history tours as you know we talked about these things in episode 12. we also talked about it in the neighborhood google earth episode we did here at elevenses uh i have an entire book with seven chapters on google earth so there's so many things that you can do and create and retain for your research for reference in google earth that's why i would rather do it there than at david rumsey because i don't want to jump to two places i want all the maps i'm working with in one location so i see david rumsey as a resource but i see google earth as kind of a workspace how about that so it's it's the workspace where all things geographic come together so that's just my feel on it but you know after you work with it if you try the geo-referencer you might think differently but uh there's so many things that we can use it for it just seems a shame to be working in two spots map rank search that is another way a key way to browse and search for maps the important thing to understand about that is right now according to their website that collection uh that is accessed by map rank search is about six thousand maps and the difference is the quality of the tool it's an excellent tool i wish all 100 000 could be found searchable through map rank but they're not so there is a difference i'm going to show you both and oftentimes i would say to get started using david rumsey i think map rank is a good place to start even though it's a smaller collection you might very well find what you need it's a vast collection it's 6 000 maps and it's worldwide the tool is wonderful and then if you don't find what you need maybe you go to the luna viewer we'll talk about that another place that you can view rumsey maps is again over at google earth so i showed you that in our beginning and there's about 120 maps they said that on the website now i've read other places at google that it's 150 maps i i know it varies but it's in the couple 100 and those are found through the layers panel and you can also add additional maps now again i'm not so sure in checking david rumsey's website last night if this is totally up to date but i know when i download the additional maps i think i showed that to you in episode 12. i know i cover it in the book you can access another chunk of maps and they're saying it's about 140. gosh when i looked at it it looked like it was about 300 but you know the numbers in the in a couple of hundreds so those can all be accessed through google earth and you can actually save them to your places panel the particular maps that apply to your research you can also find the 120 ramsey maps over at google maps so how did they decide which 120 uh essentially when google first approached them they said would you give us 120 that are global in nature so we want one on every continent at least and we want them um to touch on important places historical places time frames that were key so they really tried to find things that would be of the greatest interest to the most people and historically significant so that's kind of the thing so you won't find as many of the town maps that i think are really interesting because you know our ancestors lived in towns because those aren't going to be as applicable to everybody around the world so that just kind of gives you a sense but there are some fantastic maps just in that simple collection second life i haven't heard about second life in a long time i never really got involved with it but um it's that virtual world out there and if you're involved in second life you can view some of the maps small collection of them in three dimensions and they say at a huge scale so they have something called rumsey maps island at second life this is over my head but you know if you're into second life you'll know what i'm talking about and they have like a welcome center you can check out certain maps they have 600 a 600 meter tall map cylinder showing hundreds of maps it's it's wild i saw the picture of it so when you go into this virtual world that's the kind of experience that they're trying to create i wouldn't say that's the place to go to look for maps for genealogy because there's so much more at davidrumsey.com you can even find them through the ticker that's really a browsing tool and a big distraction skip it it's going to take you down a rabbit hole there's also something that you'll see on the website it's called insight java client it's a downloadable workspace now you might find as you get more experience with this that you would be interested in using that we're not going to touch on it today because there simply isn't enough time in this episode and i would consider it more of an advanced feature but just know you'll hear that term insight java client and it's something like google earth that you download to your computer and work within but the most important tools that we're going to talk about today the two top ways to search for your maps out of all the different options they're now providing are the luna viewer and the map rank search so again luna viewer that's the main search box on the top of the page and that's a hundred thousand digitized maps map rank digs into about 6 000 of those but gives you a i think a more powerful tool so let's talk about the luna viewer because i think this is probably the one you'll use most because it has the most in it so you can browse and search specifically for these 100 000 free maps under view collection you'll see all these different options i just mentioned right but we're going to focus on the luna viewer and you'll notice whenever you click things on the website it's going to open it up in a new tab for you so here's all the different items here when you click through to view the entire collection you can specifically pick luna viewer and then you'll see a little brief description and then that launch luna viewer button that's what we're going to click so this was the luna viewer and i want to show you how to specifically dig into it okay so first of all there's the search box at the top so here is where you would enter a location a town a county whatever you're looking for so i'm gonna come up here and i am gonna search for dortmund germany okay and we're going to click this button now you'll notice a little pop-down came up there's other options but we're just going to search all the catalog data what i notice is a little search you can't click it until you get away from that and close that pop-up so go up and then click it like i said i think the luna viewer is a little bit glitchy now they have found 18 maps that specifically refer to dortmund germany this is where my my great grandparents were from isn't this beautiful oh my gosh someone like i said some of the artwork and these old map books are amazing so you'll notice on the upper right hand corner that there's these little thumbnails and we can jump between each of these 18 maps or we can take them here from the home page see how we can click through and click the next one now it doesn't mean that every one of these maps is a dortmund look at this this is amsterdam and if we click another one oh this looks like it comes out of a book with hanover maps why would a map of amsterdam or you know here's hanover so hanover maybe it's close to dortmund who knows but if we go look over here in the source information now we're gonna see this is what it picked up so if the place you're looking for is called something else or has is in multiple places that name is used in many different states and countries you're going to get a lot of different maps so we have to refine it down a little bit so just know it's it's looking at the metadata it's looking at any words associated with the map and it's retrieving those for you and each map has a little zoom tool right down here at the bottom so you click the plus to zoom in you click the minus to zoom out so it gives you a smaller subset of maps but it's not necessarily going to be exactly what you want you're going to have to look at each one and see whether or not it's really the town the dortmund that i was looking for maybe hanover is next door maybe there aren't any for dortmund and so it gave me the closest thing it could find all of those are possibilities okay so here's an example of a search that we could do and there's kind of a challenge when you're using the search field to search because it is just looking at this metadata now you can imagine if i search for new york city i'm not only going to find maps of new york city i'm going to find maps that were published in new york city right or that the author is from new york city so that poses some challenges that means we're going to have to use the refine tool on the left side of the screen and this works really well but again it's a little bit glitchy so you have to get used to kind of maneuvering around it a bit let me show you so if we come up here i've run a search for new york city now i noticed that whenever i hover my mouse over this refine tool sometimes the little pop-up box for the closest map pops up and you may just have to click away and come back each section in refine has a more so whenever you see more you know there are more categories available to you we could click i want where new york and why so specifically maps of new york that would be a way to get rid of a lot of the extra stuff you'll notice that we can um add who who is the publisher of the map if there's something specific you're looking for if i click more under when look at my options for finding the map that fits the time frame that i'm doing my genealogy research so here we've got 1874. now there's a little bit of a downside in this because you saw that they were categorizing every by year there was tons of years in there we can't really get a spread very well so you might have to click through and look at each year within the time frame spread that you're kind of keeping your eye on and i thought this was fun we talked about the 1939 world's fair last uh episode and gosh right at the bottom there was a map and it was like a tourist guide map for folks who had attended the 1939 world's fair so this happened in new york that means that this falls within our results list kind of a unique map and certainly for our viewer last mo last week who shared the photograph of her grandmother i think it was her mother standing right in front of the adams fountain at the world's fair this would be kind of a fun addition to the family history so the bottom line here is is that we're searching within the search field and we're really searching all the metadata metadata being any words information associated with each map we can close that refine section if you find a map you really want to get more screen coverage you can close that up a little bit as you click each item to refine you can remove them if you want to and resort now notice there's actually two pages to this map so just like you know genealogical records look and see at the top it'll say related right above the buy print button because you can buy prints of the maps if you want but there's a little related it will tell you how many related images there are in this case there were two so we knew even though we were seeing the one on our screen we should be clicking through because there's another page to this and there was there was a back side to this so one of the ways to get around some of the challenges of doing your initial search and then refining would be to use their advanced search field so you'll find advanced search actually in two places the first is at the very bottom of the refine column and that will pop up this what you see on the screen here also remember when we clicked into the search field in the upper right hand corner we had some options and the last option was also advanced search so if you start to type in your search and you're like uh i need help with this go ahead and just click advanced search you'll get this and then now you can enter more specific specific information and have multiple items that you're searching within really helpful when your search results you know brings back a thousand maps and you know that you want to get more specific than that so play with this and you can see it prompts you whether you want to find all the words that you're listing or just any of them if you're just looking for maybe a couple of towns around a town that's hard to find or a town that is no longer there or no longer called that name today you can also do the exact wording you know in our google searches we talk about putting quotation marks around a word or a phrase to get exact wording you can do that through search as well i tested quotation marks in the search field it doesn't work so you've got to use the advanced search that's just a tip if you want to get a specific phrase like world's fair perfect example of one that you'd want to search through the advanced search field okay so let's do an advanced search for sanborn fire insurance maps i love these maps because they're so specific to neighborhoods and towns if we just do a basic search of sanborn fire of all the data and click now not to see it's not clicking you have to pull away and then you have to go back up and click it and it's because that drop-down box so sanborn fire look at this we've got over 400 pages of maps and they consider one page to be one map so even if it's a much larger map it's a piece of a map if it's one page it's one map then we can come over here to refine and we could say well i just want a sanborn fire but for new york city now i saw this map and i thought this does not look like a sanborn fire map in fact i've seen this map before in google earth so i was curious i came over down come down here and look at the source information and you'll see why we got this it's by sanborn and bromley right so if we were to do an advanced search and put sanborn fire in the exact phrase we wouldn't get this map because that's not what this map was but it did come back now look here let's try with quotation marks put the it doesn't work you'll get zero okay so use advanced search to put an exact phrase but keep in mind in a case like sanborn fire insurance maps they were not always called by that exact phrase throughout all the time frame that they were produced so you would actually be eliminating sanborn maps from your results if you got that exact so i like to start kind of wide kind of a wide net um but we can use how about the in the advanced search try this in all fields you'll be able to find the publisher and that got me thinking if i'm looking at who's the publication author and i just put sanborn i can see if it's always been sanborn fire insurance maps or whether there are a variety of names now look over here in the refine column under who you see all the different variations there's probably six different variations of the sanborn publication name so if we were searching for that name as an exact phrase any one of those we wouldn't get the other ones so keep that in mind now let's try another one i was going to look for stillwater minnesota this is the town where my lynch and scully families were from we talked about in my irish consultation episode and my filling in the blanks episode and thomas scully had a bar downtown and and bridget and all the children live there look at this we just put in still water and again starting wide if i just put the name of the town i can quickly assess well i've got nine maps here and um several are minnesota so here's stillwater m-i-n-n period and so we know if we go over to where now you can see six of them were i think stillwater minnesota many of these are nearby or they mentioned stillwater in some form maybe the the author of the map was from stillwater we've also got washington county minnesota which is where stillwater is so it's kind of nice to take a quick look at the where and see what all the different options are gotta love these old maps because some of the town maps are just house by house drawn in and for that given time frame this is 1874. so my scully family is living here but the building where thomas had his bar downtown is actually not yet built yet so it's really uh kind of interesting to see the layout of land when they first arrived this is probably you know 10 15 years after they got there so lots of great very specific town and location maps and county maps you saw we had washington county that would be a really interesting one to look at as well so you're going to want to download the maps right you find this and you think oh this is perfect oh i want to create an overlay over at google earth using this town map we need to export it so at the top right hand corner of any map page you're going to click export notice how many options you have here's the thing if you download small medium i've even done large 3000 pixels a small would be 768 pixels it looks great just basically on your screen if you try to zoom in it goes blurry so we have something to to kind of have to take into account which is we've only got so much storage space on our computer you might end up wanting to get you know an external hard drive to store your high resolution maps but the key here is to download the highest resolution that you can handle for storage and when it's one that i really think is just incredibly important for my research i'm going to refer to a lot i go for the largest i can possibly do it takes a little bit longer it might take even up to a minute for it to finish processing and download to your computer but i have found that the extra large is a good size to be able to zoom in retain clarity but not take up so much space because the next size up is almost twice the size the extra extra large so let's do that with our stillwater map we're going to click export and come down and select here we could do these small ones they're not going to help us at all though if we try to really get in there and look at the names that are written on these maps so we could do let's do a large so we're downloading it's going to be a jpeg we open it up it looks great if we zoom in now i'm just looking at it in my windows viewer and i'm actually going to turn it around because this is how i'm used to looking at it in google in google earth and it will help me find that thomas's place was on main street and it was right at the intersection with myrtle which i think is up here by the freight depot um so broadway turns into main it's right around here okay so that's great but when i zoom in and i want to get a closer look you know it it's not it's got a little bit of fuzziness if i go to export and do the extra large i'm almost doubling the size of the map in resolution so i won't have any problem putting this into google earth here it is i mean both can go into google earth but i really want to be able to zoom in just as close as i can with all the other rumzy maps that i find in the gallery so we'll turn this around and as we zoom in again it stays really sharp even closer look how close you can go in so it's worth it do it uh you can download under export go for extra large if you can and again consider how you're going to use the map and how much storage you have so our other top way to search and find these maps that you can download for free is the map rank search remember this one doesn't do the entire hundred thousand collection it's really around six thousand maps but it does it by time and place and this is so cool so we're gonna from the home page we're gonna go all the way down to the bottom of the page and that's where we found map rank you can also find it through the menu system at the top and select it that way but this shows you what it's going to look like and gives you a little button we're going to click launch map rank so this tool will open up in a new browser tab and this one i think is a really good place to first start searching for maps because of the glitchiness in the luna viewer i think you're gonna find this really rewarding it's a huge collection anyway and i think you'll probably find maps unless you have a very obscure place that you're looking for so i'm gonna look for a semi i mean it's a place that isn't called this anymore which is christ ordersburg it's the uh district the county area where my great-grandmother was born and she was born in grindelwald and baptized in klein jeruton parish but that was all within ortelsburg okay but look at this down the bottom there's a time slider watch what's happening to our results list on the right it changes every time we come up another century so these maps go back centuries but i want ordelsburg maps between 1700 and 1900 and now my results list is zeroed in on that so it's the perfect melding of location and time frame which is what we're all about in this list they are prioritized starting at the top by what is closest to what it was you were asking for i'm going to just take the christ part off and put ordelsburg okay so now notice that my my map titles say ordelsburg the modern day map which is looks like google maps says the polish name of that town the center of ordersburg what it was back in east prussia back in the day um i can't even begin to pronounce it i don't know we had somebody from poland here one time watching the show maybe they could tell me so if i click the very first map that's the one that is according to david rumsey the closest map with the most detail for this area and it looks pretty good so we can use the zoom tool and zoom in come over here check out the source information this says it's um 1888 was when this was produced who produced it the type of map it is the scale and any kind of notation so this is where you're going to be able to get your source information to attach to the map if you use it in other areas of your research and you can just like google earth you can click on the map and you can drag it drag it around move around to look at the various locations let's come down here oh and look at this so kl klein jerutin that is where the church was where my great-grandmother was baptized and of course the beauty of this is that it's not called that today so this old map that they've brought in all of these are geo-referenced so we can zoom in here this is her brother johann and his in his baptism uh record right out of the church says client you're rooting on it and this is the place so it's exciting to see um where it is and where that would be today so here's another example and i want to show you how um search selection works and navigation because remember as we were moving our time slider we ended up with the results list on the right hand side was ever changing okay so we got it up to 1700 we bring it down to 1900 but what i want you to notice is is that when you're looking at the modern day map and you're trying to figure out which of the old maps you'd like to select when you hover your mouse over each item notice the red box okay that's kind of a brownish reddish box here's the next one so it's showing you exactly what that old map will cover so looking at the modern map this is really handy guys because sometimes you'll turn on a map on in google earth from rumsey maps and you'll go oh well it's massive or it's off to the side this will show you exactly so you've got your your eye on the town you're looking for you know which one you want to click because it's highlighted it for you i love that feature and i didn't notice that at first when i first started using david ramsey's website but it's really handy to p to more quickly pick the one you want and then as we zoom in notice down here at the bottom that little tiny picture so within the picture is a little grayed out box and you can click and move that box to kind of more smoothly maneuver around the map and and move you've probably seen that kind of a tool with newspaper records it's very handy with the old maps again you could click on the screen itself but this gives you a little bit of control once you zero right in on the spot that you want so you can compare these old and new maps so i've pulled up this one of kline to rooting now my great grandmother says she was uh born in grundvald and can we find there it is yay okay so it's uh right above gherkin next to the forest we're gonna zoom in here let's compare how look at they've actually drawn the little houses right here in the town if we come up here and view it in the georeferencer remember i mentioned that one somebody's already done the work you can do a comparison and kind of get that overlay effect that we get in google earth so we pull up the map get to the spot here i'm going to zoom in a little bit and there's grindelwald and and again it's amazing how far in you can zoom in to the point where you see those tiny little houses that they've drawn and when we go up to the top this slider watch what happens there it is now we're looking at it compared to the google map which isn't all that exciting honestly so let's change it up here in the left-hand side if you click the globe now you have a lot of different options to compare let's just compare satellite view this is a much more realistic view of what the current day um terrain looks like now let's slide back that town hasn't changed much it looks like it's expanded a bit to the south but so many of those little houses are right there you could even jump into street view and take a look at it if street view happens to be available in this location and that's another reason why i like to do it in google earth because then i can do that and i can mark houses and i can you know do all those things and i can save it and just retain it as part of my entire genealogy research collection i call it my historical map collection and um i've got a premium video on how to create a historical map collection in google earth so let's recap two ways key ways to find these maps that i would recommend one the luna viewer this is the one that's gonna give you the hundred thousand maps it's gonna help you search for and refine your search it's a little glitchy not my favorite i hope they fix it but also the second one is map rank search now this one works beautifully much smaller collection but a very significant collection and certainly one that i have continually found maps that i was looking for in a variety of locations so it was not a disappointment you get more control with that time slider which is so cool and also that you're still being able to zero in on location the map results that you're getting in that right hand column are ranked by which one is the closest coverage if you want to learn more about how to do this of course i cover tons on how to do it in the book if you are a premium member i know many of you are i hope you are log into your premium membership and our website go under premium to premium videos so there's a couple of important videos here i want you to be aware of um one is here's all the different categories we have you're going to be looking for the geography collection of videos these are full-length video classes they all have handouts if you're new to google earth go do this first the google earth for genealogy beginner sanborn fire maps i've got two different videos that go much more into specific detail where to find them and you can bring them into google earth and also how to interpret them this one is how to create your historic map collection and that's where i'm saying pull it all together in one workspace and if you need more maps beyond david rumsey the best websites for finding historical maps includes some of the top other websites that i have found over the years and many of them just have amazing collections each class you can download the handout so don't miss that there's a link above your video to download the handout and then you can watch the video and some of you are asking about where some of the early episodes of elevenses are and that's part of your premium membership too so just click on elevens is with lisa in premium all the ones that have been archived and kind of moved off to the site are available there and all the downloadable handouts of course for the free ones too you can download handouts there's a newsletter sign up that's a way anybody can stay in touch with us absolutely free and then you can also click here on our home page for premium membership the newsletter is really important way to stay in touch and of course premium members uh for all the free elevens with lisa videos that are out there and there's dozens um you also have a unique downloadable pdf of the handouts so that my friends is mapping and i just hope you loved it and found things that you wanted um let me get back here to chat uh question are they continually adding to the map rank search collection yes i believe so so because the geo-referencing is ongoing those are i think getting moved under there that's the plan and if you want to help them with the geo-referencing to move that along you can also volunteer there i had a question early on even before i jumped in oh let me see there's another one can you move a map that you find from luna's search to map rank search you actually don't need to because each of those what they do uniquely is to help you get a hold of the map once you've got a hold of the map you're really working within the same kind of spot um that's not a good word for it you're you're working with the same map so there are two different avenues to get you to the map but once you've got the map then you're looking at the same thing regardless of how you accessed it so there's no need to move it the one thing you move it into actually two things you can click the geo referencer button that's going to let you do that comparison and do the fading back and forth stuff you can also export it and download it and then bring that into google earth and you can overlay it there um could you put in a plantation name i'm hunting for well yeah absolutely put it this way uh mary if anything is mentioned in the map in the metadata for the map then you can search for that keyword search for it and it should pop up so um yeah absolutely cindy says i'm going to be spending a lot of time working through everything you're talking about today i know you're going to be up late today uh yes okay hang on gwen's got a question sanborn fire insurance maps where do i find the key to the symbols and are they the same from year to year do they change one i think they do sometimes change and you typically and that's a good question the key to the symbols so i i go over those specifically in those premium videos but most of the books if you think of the maps as coming out of a larger collection that sanborn publishes that year wherever you get the map from whether it's from davidrumsey.com or you get it through library of congress you might want to check to the front of the book or the back of the book the or the collection so the digitized pages should have an overview of all of the meanings behind what you're seeing in those maps many times the first page of the map and sanborn had many pages for each town sometimes because of how large the area was and how close and specific the maps were so look on the pages themselves sometimes the very first page of that particular town to see what the unique key is on the bottom of the page but typically they came out of even even larger publication and that publication would have had several pages also the library of congress has a wonderful guide to interpreting google or sanborn fire insurance maps i will put that on my list to put for you in the show notes so that you can get a hold of that and finally would it be best to start out with the simplest search and then go wider like birmingham and then birmingham england yes i think so now birmingham england england i might just do birmingham england but not any kind of exact phrase or anything like that and see what happens and then refine from there um in the case of when i did still water just putting in still water worked well the first time i did i put in still water capital m capital n thinking like a googling search which is google would understand that that includes minnesota spelled out and it includes m-i-n-n david rums it doesn't work that way it's a great example of how search engines vary every single website so i went back to start broad and i just put the name of stillwater i would start with birmingham and then go from there and maybe go in and just add the name england or use the advanced search um oh well good i'm glad you guys have enjoyed it one of the things i wanted to say really quickly was i wanted to give a really big thank you shout out to all the wonderful societies that have been supporting the show elevens is with lisa genealogy societies are the backbone of our industry and all of our research and there's just a smattering of them that i have noticed and come across at facebook guys you know if you're enjoying the free show telling a friend about it sharing it on facebook that means the world to us that helps us so much because that ad that you see pop up before the video well it helps keep these lights on around here but keeps the show free for you so thank you so much to all of you so with that have a wonderful week happy mapping happy searching and i'll have show notes for you here in just a couple of days thank you so much for joining me my friend i will talk to you soon [Music] you

Channel: Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems

Views: 2,489

Rating: 4.9578948 out of 5

Keywords: genealogy, family history, podcast, old maps, free old maps, david rumsey, davidrumsey.com, sanborn fire insurance maps, lisa louise cooke, elevenses with LIsa, cartography, digital maps, geneology, find old maps, historical maps, how to find old maps, how to use david rumsey website

Id: mvm6LYBUaNE

Length: 53min 49sec (3229 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020