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Family Tree Magazine Podcast
Best Websites – Study the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries with Lisa Louise Cooke
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The Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries is a free website that helps you identify changing county boundaries throughout history. Listen, and learn how to use this interactive site as well as how to download files for later use.
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The next generation of family history is here. Storied is taking family history to new and exciting places with AI Storied books and more. With billions of historical records and exclusive newspaper publications, you can build and expand your family tree with ease. Collaborating with your family has never been easier or more affordable. Don't let your family's legacy go untold. Preserve these memories in a beautiful interactive form format that will be cherished for generations. Turn your family's journey into a stunning storied book, a keepsake to pass down to your children and grandchildren. Visit Storied today and get started for free. That's storied S-T-O-R-I-E-D.com welcome to Family Tree magazine's best websites podcast. This is the podcast devoted to finding finding the best websites to help you with your genealogy research. I'm Lisa Louise Cook. In this episode we are taking a look at the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries website. This is a website that is part of the Newberry Library in Chicago and it has its own URL address. So you're going to want to visit digital.newberry.org/ahcb for atlas historical county boundaries/project HTML. Yep, it's not a real straightforward URL, but we will have that link for you in the show notes. You can also just google it. Atlas of Historical County Boundaries so what is this website? Well, if you've been doing genealogy for many years, you might remember the book that that many of us had back in the old days before the Internet, where we would look up the origins of a particular county. So if you knew there was a town where you believed your ancestors were from, you would need to know what the county was at the time that they lived there. So it's not just place, but it comes together in conjunction with timeframe. And that's really key because sometimes these boundaries change. And that's what this website is all about. It automates the process. You don't have to look it up in a book anymore. You can come straight to the website and work with it. So the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries project was finished up in June of 2010. It's been online. It covers all 50 states and the national data files and animations that you see there on the website were all contributed a couple years later in 2012. It's still very relevant and has everything that you need to be able to look up locations. I think it's also important to say that there's some interesting elements to this that even if you've used it before you might not be aware of. According to their website, this not only covers the changing size, shape and locations of different counties in all 50 states over the years and the District of Columbia, but but it also includes non county areas, unsuccessful authorizations for new counties, changes in county names and organization, and the temporary attachments of non county areas and unorganized counties to fully functioning counties. The principal sources for these data are the most authoritative available. They come from the cession laws of the colonies, territories and states that created and changed the counties. What does all that mean? It means if you have kind of a sticky area you're working on in your family tree and it's a little unclear what the location was at that time, it might be one of these unusual situations. And that again makes this website so valuable because you can come here, navigate the map and put it in conjunction with time frame and find out what was going on. Maybe it was a temporary situation where something didn't end up going through and getting added to the county. So it will give you some ideas, some clues as to if you're not finding records in the county, you expect where else should you be looking based on kind of what was going on at that time. And that's what they're capturing here on the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. Now, there's two significant ways to use this free website. And yes, it's absolutely free. The data is free. And the first way is to just work with it within your web browser. So again you head to the website digital.newberry.org ahcb project HTML. It's a mouthful. And when you get there, you're going to see a couple of maps. The one at the top is the state data for the United States. Below that you'll see national data and boundary animations. The main thing I think that you might want to do if you're brand new to the website, is go ahead and click using the atlas in the menu there. It outlines kind of the ways that you can interact with this interactive map that's in your web browser. And I say that because we have another alternative way to use it offline. So first and foremost let's focus on using it here at the website. When you click on the map, you can pan so you can move the map around. You can literally just use your mouse to click on it and then drag it around to get to where you want to go. There's also a zoom tool, so look for the plus and the minus sign to zoom in and out. There's a full screen icon so that you can click that and really fill up your entire screen and get a nice big look at the area that you're focusing on. There's also a print feature so that once you find a location and pull up some data, then you can grab a print of that screen. So that's really, really nice. Now you can hover over a location and get more information about it. So if you zero in on a particular area, I'm looking at their example here on the website of kind of the area of Texas and Arkansas and some of the counties that were there at a particular time. If you hover over that area, you can view information about the effective dates and the description of the border changes on a specific county. And that will show up in a pop up text box. Again, that could be part of your print screen if you want to capture that as well. So it's going to give you some of the background. What are they basing these borders on? Now if you have just one state that you want to work with, you might want to just start with the state data and hover your mouse over that map. You'll see each state kind of light up when you hover over it. You click on the state and then you can click on View the interactive map that's going to bring you in in that focused area, just that state. And it'll have some boundaries outlined for you. When I clicked on New Mexico, it brought me to the default of the first recorded boundaries. 1850. It was December 13th of 1850. You'll see these dates in a little box over on the left hand side. And so for every time there was a change recorded that they've captured here, you will a date listed representative. So you can come in here and click. It comes all the way through March 17th of 1981. And when you hover over it again, it'll show you the county, region name, the effective dates that they're talking about, and a kind of a text description of what the changes were at that particular time. So that's a really easy way to zero in if you know one particular state. But if you want to kind of look at the national picture, I would scroll down and click the national data map, which the difference is you'll see that the map is just one color. It doesn't have all the different states outlined on it. When you click on that, then you can view the historical commentary, view metadata on it and just click through and kind of explore. But I think generally if you're going to want to really get into Specific counties, you're going to want to probably focus on that state data map at the top. Now, the third option that you'll see on the homepage is the boundary animations. That's really kind of a demo, if you will. So if you click on it, it will run through and you can click the Play button and it will show how all these different outlines come and go as the counties change over time. So that's not as much a tool for your genealogy research, but it's kind of a fun thing to take a look at. It's just amazing how much data they have here. So that's how we would use the interactive state data that is on the website itself in our web browser. Now, the nice thing about this is, is the data is available to download, and that gives you flexibility to use it in different kinds of programs, not just in this website. So to do that, click on download files. Now, why would you want to download the data that has all of these interactive county boundaries? Well, I do it because I use this all the time in Google Earth. So Google Earth is also a free downloadable software program. Google owns it, and you can install it on your computer and you can bring in files, and this is one of them. So they're going to give you this data in a format that that Google Earth can understand. Now, that format is called kmz, so you'll be looking for that, but you might have other programs that are kind of geographically oriented, and those may very likely use GIS format files. And that is also something that you can download. The third option that they make available to you is PDF, But I think one of the best ones to use is the KMZ and use it in Google Earth because it's absolutely free. And you can do so much genealogy research and storytelling in Google Earth. I mean, there's just countless ways. That's one of the things I kind of specialize in the work that I do. And I think that you will love it if you bring it in and start working with it, because not only will you have all these counties outlined for you on the Google Earth map, but then you can start adding place marks and icons and pictures and all this information about your family kind of building out the area where they lived. So to download the data, we are going to click state downloads. Okay, so here's another choice for you to make. You can download the entire United States data file, or you can download just one particular state. These are fairly large files, and when I use them in Google Earth, I typically only kind of activate or turn on the couple states or the one state that I'm working with at that time because it can be kind of cumbersome and you want your your program to move quickly. So I don't want to overwhelm it if I don't need all the states to look at. So you have that option. You can click State Downloads and just select the states that you need, or you can go ahead and click US Downloads and get the entire file. You'll see lots of options here and the main difference is 1 the file type and 2 whether or not the file includes Alaska and Hawaii. Again, if you're not going to be doing genealogical research in either one of those states, you might just want the continental United States and you can download that file. So click that, download it to your computer and you can use it. Now, of course many of us are very concerned about copyright issues and right here on their website it says the data used in the Atlas Project is readily available to download and to be consulted, reviewed and reused for any lawful purpose, commercial or non commercial, without licensing or permission fees to the library. Please note that some files may contain the original out of date copyright license and those can be ignored. Bottom line, this is copyright free. It is available for you to download and to use any way that you wish for your genealogical research. This is absolutely one of the best websites out there for genealogy, even though it's not technically a genealogy website. But that's what we're looking for, right? We're looking for the tools that we need to accomplish the goals that we have in our genealogy research. I hope you've enjoyed this Best Websites episode from Family Tree Magazine and that you give the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries at the Newberry a try again. Head to the Show Notes page. That's where you're going to find a link directly to their website. Thanks for joining me again. I'm Lisa Louise Cook and you can visit me over at my website as well. @genealogygems.com Check out my Lisa's Picks column in every issue of Family Tree Magazine. And While you're@familytreemagazine.com podcast where you will find the show notes, be sure and sign up for Family Tree Magazine's free email newsletter. It's really the best way to stay abreast of everything going on at Family Tree Magazine. Thanks so much for listening. Have fun climbing your Family Tree.