52 Weeks to Better Genealogy = Challenge 8 Online Maps

Arizona Online Map Collections:

Arizona Route 66  - The site, Road Wanderer, is dedicated to “lost byways, historic highways and legendary journeys” of an earlier age and contains many fun things to check out but I will be talking about the map of Route 66 today. Spend some time reading about the history of Route 66 then as author, Guy Randall says “buckle up” for a cyber tour with the interactive map. The author states initially his plan was to document the “vanished road” that was Route 66, in California and Arizona, but morphed into a discovery and documentary of the entire length of Route 66. There are wonderful old pictures and descriptions of the towns along the way. Each section of Route 66 is divided by state and the cyber tour takes the reader to all different areas of the map just by clicking. Words don’t do justice. If you are at all interested in the history of this route or the small towns along it’s route, I highly recommend visiting this site. Author and Web Design – Guy Randall.

Sharlott Hall Museum – Yavapai County Historical Society maps and Arizona Memory Project. - The Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona provides wonderful historical events as well as an extensive research facility. The grounds and building of the Museum are the original first territorial Governor’s residence which was restored by Sharlot M. Hall (1870-1943), Arizona’s first territorial historian. Just in checking the map holdings I found maps from as early as 1778 which was a Spanish ethnographic map of the southwest. There are plat maps of Prescott, numerous railroad maps, road maps, geographic maps and mining operation maps. The online presence displays the maps at a low to medium resolution depending on the map, but for reasonable prices you can purchase maps of interest in various formats from a print to a cd to an emailed image. Some of the maps show the different proposed boundaries of the territories of the west in 1859, which is very different from what we have today. Anyone doing research in this part of the country should check out Sharlot Hall Museum Research/Archives.

Cline Library – The Northern Arizona University private collection apparently has quite an extensive map collection in their archives, but there were only a few displayed online.

Livingston County Michigan Historical and Genealogical Project website created and maintained by Pam Rietsch – 1895 Rand McNally New World Atlas. This website has extremely high resolution scans of pages from the above atlas for all the states. Definitely a wonderful resource for state maps and county maps of 1895. There are several other interesting items on this site but I’ll let you explore on your own. One other map link on the Livingston co, Michigan website is for maps scanned and uploaded to the internet by Miss Roelof Oddens. I did not have a chance to explore the site too much, but it appears to be very comprehensive with many OLD maps, especially of Europe.

My last item of interest is Map History/History of Cartography: THE Gateway to the Subject . The link to US maps is here.  This is as it says, a gateway to other sites on the internet with map images. The site provides indexes and links to numerous sites with maps on the web. Take a cup of tea and spend some quality time checking out this site and its links.

I hope I have given you something new to look at that will help in your family research and understanding of our country's history. I sure have found some new things for myself. Looking forward to the next challenge for 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy.