Every time I find a new address for one
of my people I click to an online mapping program to see where it is.
Is the house still there? What did it look like? How far was it
from the house they lived in the previous year? Was it across town
or just around the corner? Where was it in relation to other
relatives' homes or to the person's place of business? I want to be
able to see all of these things at once. Now, I have a way to get
the big picture. I asked my mom if she happened to have an old map
of Kalamazoo. Luckily, she did. Now I have begun marking the map to
indicate where my people lived and worked.
I started with the low hanging fruit.
I copied the known addresses for my ancestors (and some of their kin
in whom I am interested) into a spread sheet along with their years
in residence. Borrowing my daughter's markers I selected a color
for each person/family. Using an online mapping program I then began
to mark my map. This is a work in progress, but here's a photograph
of what I have so far.
For me this is a qualitative project.
Sometimes I may not be able to easily identify the exact house
(assuming houses still exist at the specified location) because house
numbers changed at least once in Kalamazoo
(for more on that and Kalamazoo street name changes see my post).
If a house number changed by only a few numbers it won't change the
big picture. If I want to know exactly which house my family lived
in I'll need to do some more work in historic maps and/or city
directories.
As with anything else, mapping the past
requires a certain amount of common sense. When an address seems to
be too far outside of downtown red flags start popping up in my head.
This could indicate that the street name has changed. Opening a
historical map of Kalamazoo can often solve that issue (a few are
available at www.kalamazoogenealogy.org).
I have also run into another problem
with online mapping. According to Google maps, 521 E. Main St. and
517 W. Main St. are in the same place. Clearly, that wasn't correct.
The key was realizing that Main street changes to E. Michigan Ave,
but at the turn of the last century it was still E. Main St. A quick
check of the street index in the 1899 city directory confirmed the
location. Problem solved.
In addition to street name changes,
other features may have altered since our ancestor's time. For
instance, I noticed that Dan Harrigan's property on Portage (just
north of Harrigan court) used to back up to one of two mill ponds
(apparently long since drained). The mill ponds were just north and
south of Lake street east of Portage. I added those to my map as
well.
