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.

Mapping Monday-Downtown Calhoun 1911

Portion of Downtown Calhoun, GA with overlay of 1911 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map

Mapping Monday

With last week's window fun I haven't had a chance to map anything new. Sadly this week isn't looking much better. It was free and clear but now I have agreed to four meetings (in addition to the two I attended today!). So, to try and satisfy any mapping desires my readers might have, I'm providing this image of some of my other Gordon Co., GA ancestors.
In this image you can see several places I marked by overlaying an old Civil War map I found online (map overlay is most of what appears 'white'). This map was produced as a negative and rougher than the one I had used for the Calhoun area. The advantage of this map was that it showed a few of my ancestors lands and home. I believe the map only shows Union sympathizers but I'm not positive.
This map was much easier to work with by making the background transparent (in Photoshop). Since the quality of the map was not as exact it took more twisting to accurately place it. Being able to see all the features of the map AND all the satellite image features sped things up. I've found if you can get your map to have white features and a transparent background it is much easier to work with, especially if you're trying to locate small features on the ground (such as the two ferries above or the three homesteads).

Mapping Mondays

You may not be able to see the details on this image as clearly as you'd like but I just wanted to start with something fairly simple for those not familiar with Google Earth.
This is a snapshot of the Calhoun, GA area. Calhoun is near the upper right corner. The Oostanaula River runs along the left half of the image. The red/fuchsia boxes represent the land lots bought by my Miller ancestors. These are just the early lots. Part of Filing Fridays will be to locate copies of their other deeds and enter those lots into Google Earth.
I was able to place my own three types of places on this map using different methods and I'll talk about these in other posts. The Miller Cemetery was located using the GNIS system and simply entering the coordinates and placing a marker there. Miller's Mill was located using an old Civil War map I found online. I marked a number of other places using that map and others but it gets rather crowded so I only showed the Mill on this image. The land lots were placed using other old maps showing the land lots and then drawing polygons to represent the lots (I already had a spreadsheet listing the lot descriptions so I didn't have to dig through my files to locate copies of the deeds).
You can see that it is quite nice being able to see my historic places on a modern satellite image. I'll feature some other images in future posts as well as some general information about Google Earth.