Have you looked for online maps of towns or other named places in Canada? You may have found that the most popular Canadian mapping site, "Geographical Names of Canada," has very detailed place names but only has low resolution maps when compared to today's other online mapping services. Of course, you can look at the maps on the other services, but they are not as good at finding place names, especially of the smaller villages. Now a free online service combines the best of both worlds: data from the "Geographical Names of Canada" plus much better maps from Google Maps, Live Local, MapQuest, and Yahoo! Maps.
The free "Places in Canada" site includes place information and mapping resources for over 28,000 places in Canada. You can review a list of place names by province or territory. From there, you navigate to links that use Google Maps, Live Local, MapQuest, or Yahoo! Maps to display the place, access aerial photos, and so forth.
John Cardinal created the new "Places in Canada" site because of his frustration with the maps on "Geographical Names of Canada." He found that he could use that site for place names and simultaneously open another window to look at maps on Google Maps, Live Local, MapQuest, or Yahoo! Maps. However, the process was awkward, at best. John then decided to do something about that. He created a rather elegant solution.
The "Places in Canada" site has links to the four mapping services for more than 28,000 places in Canada. Once you open a map page, all the features of the mapping service are at your disposal, including satellite photos.
I decided to look for Miramichi, New Brunswick, where some of my ancestors lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s. I first went to the "Places in Canada" site, then clicked on NEW BRUNSWICK and then clicked on the ALL PLACES link. A list of 2,257 New Brunswick place names appeared on-screen, all in alphabetical order. I scrolled down the list and clicked on MIRAMICHI. A new page appeared, showing the name of Miramichi with four single letter links: G, L, M and Y. Clicking on each of those four links took me directly to maps of Miramichi as found on:
Google Maps
Live Local Maps (supplied by Microsoft)
MapQuest
Yahoo Maps
What could be easier?
"Places in Canada" is a great resource for genealogists, historians, vacationers, residents, and many others. John Cardinal has done a great job.
You can access "Places in Canada" at http://www.johncardinal.com/ca
