How often have you tried searching for an ancestor's historical records for a given county, only to later find that you were searching in the right place but the wrong county? Boundary lines have changed frequently throughout the history of the United States. In order to find records, you must know the county in which your ancestor lived IN THE YEAR OF INTEREST. The result is that there's a very good chance that you are sometimes looking in the wrong county for some of your genealogical records.
Randy Majors has created a tool to help genealogists find the correct county for the year of interest. The new software tool displays data from the Newberry Library's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries on top of Google Maps.
Randy writes, "Using the fantastic information from the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, I've created an online Historical County Boundary Maps tool based on Google Maps. You can type in ANY PLACE in the U.S. and ANY YEAR to see the map of county boundaries then in effect, along with all of the current Google Maps places, roads, etc to put the historical map in a current and familiar context! You can then click any county on the map to see the specific history of the boundary changes, and type in different years to see the boundary changes over time."
You can read more about this new mapping tool and read step-by-step instructions on Randy's blog at http://goo.gl/PDL49.
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