Freebie Friday: Historical mapping

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I was moved by a newspaper columnist’s description of the great flood in the 1940s that invaded my hometown, Omaha, Nebraska and neighboring city, Council Bluffs, Iowa. What led me to this article was an active conversation I was having with my parents about a time when the entire community pulled together to help one another.

My Dad and his buddies were drafted to help build structures to help fend off the water disaster that paralyzed the area for several weeks.

As I listened to their separate remembrances, I was scanning the flooded areas via today’s Internet. There were empty spaces where houses and businesses once stood, while stronger structures remaining upon the soggy grounds.

What was my fantastic tool to locate the historical Iowa and Nebraska? It’s the Freebie Friday “My Genealogy Hound.” It’s a great website with more than 2,100 historic county maps from throughout the United States. I’ve found it helpful when I was researching my ancestors in Georgia. I wanted to see where my paternal family lived in Helena, Arkansas in 1919, and our (Good Genes Genealogy team) maternal relatives’ homes and businesses in Springfield, Missouri between 1900 and 1945.

Some maps don’t allow the researcher to drill down and find every old road that I was seeking. Yet, most of the county maps give me a great sense of the areas.

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There’s at least one county map for every county in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia.

Only partial lists exist for the remaining U.S. states. Within all states, more county maps are regularly added.

Enjoy your genealogy geography hunting!