Digital Atlas of Historical County Boundaries

Earlier this month Dick Eastman wrote an article about the Newberry Library's completion of the Digital Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. You can read that article here. One of the options offered to users of the Digital Atlas is downloading KMZ files for use with Google Earth.

Mapping Monday - Tate, GA

This is not the most exciting Mapping Monday image. It's provided mainly for reference for later posts. If you're new to Google Earth, the additions to this particular map image are a place marker for the tombstone of Edward Patterson and the addition of a photo of Tate Station (in Google Earth, if you zoom in, the icon of the camera would become a thumbnail of the actual picture). I did not take GPS readings while visiting Old Tate Cemetery (where Edward is buried) but instead just marked as close as possible, the spot where the tombstone is. This happened to work becasue the spot was recongnizable from a satellite image but in general, taking a GPS reading at a tombstone and recording the coordinates would be best.

Filing Fridays

I keep tyring to come up with themes that work with my research but it's harder than it sounds. After attending the FxGS Conference last week I was inspired to work on several quasi-research projects. The first was to try out Google Earth which I finally found time to do Wednesday. I've already uncovered a new county to research in and that was just playing around with the program! The other project I wanted to work on is filing, both filing those piles of materials, and cleaning out my paper files, AND digitizing files. I decided Friday should be "Filing Friday" and I'm challenging everyone to post comments with updates on their successful filing efforts.

I'm going to start my first Filing Friday by combining filing with Google Earth and pulling deed records from my files and scanning them. I'll then do my best to locate the land with the help of Google Earth (this will be part of my new "Mapping Mondays" so check out those posts for details on Google Earth). I'm fortunate that the bulk of my research so far has been in parts of Georgia that were distributed by lottery (mainly the Cherokee and Gold Lotteries). In recent years I've finally started to back track to the Eastern Georgia border and slowly out of Georgia which will lead to metes and bounds lands but for all those Georgia lottery lands, I'm fortunate to have plenty of maps and the lots are mainly rectangular (those that aren't usually follow rivers or are on the border of another location, both easy situations to deal with). I mention this because using mapping as an excuse to work on filing is not a tedious process for me. If you have to sit down with your protractor and ruler and assorted other tools this probably isn't a great way to try and work through your files but maybe you have another project to force you to file. If so, share it by posting a comment any Filing Friday.