For those of you who haven't seen
elsewhere that in honor of National Library Week, ProQuest is making
its Historic MapWorks Library Edition available from your home
computer (through April 20). I saw it thanks to Family Tree Magazine's post on Facebook (you can click to the ProQuest page from there).
The first thing I did was to start downloading township maps where my
people had land. This took quite a bit of time because the images
were quite large (often 20 MB or more). I didn't mind because the
high quality maps were worth it. Although there were no maps for
some counties or time periods I was interested in, I was happy to
find some that I didn't already have.
Now that I have most of my landed folk
from the available maps, it's time to turn to my renters in the last
couple of days of access. First, I'll look for my families'
neighbors (the ones who owned land, anyway) in the census. Then if I
can to locate them on one of these maps I may have found the general
place where my people lived. I imagine my kin rented from one of
their neighbors.
You may wonder why I am interested in
having a map that doesn't show my ancestors' homesteads. Well, the
short answer is that I like maps. The long answer is that they can
still tell me something about the world my relatives inhabited. Did
they live in a very rural area or were they near a town? Were there
lakes or rivers nearby? Were the farms large or small (how many
neighbors did they have)? Looking at the neighbors, are there any
familiar surnames? The 1890 Oshtemo township map showed me how my
great-grandparents likely met; they lived just down the road from
each other.
Well, it's time for me to get back to
the maps. Only time will tell what else I might find.
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