Locate yourself

May 23, 2017 8:46 AM

The Dave Rumsey Historical Map Collection. Over 76,000 maps and images online, housed physically at Stanford but available here for your browsing pleasure.
posted by PussKillian (12 comments total)

Ooh, very nice.

I've been researching the life and times of one of my great-grand-fathers, a key figure in my family history.

This beautiful map -- created by D.G. Beers and J. Lanangan in 1877, using contemporary surveys and sources -- shows the exact location of the farm owned by his grand-father. That's the homestead of my great-great-great-grand-father, born in 1816 and named for the newly crowned national hero, General Andrew Jackson.

In fact, this valuable map helped me locate most of the homesteads of a quarter of my family tree going back to the early decades of the 19th century, as well as pinpoint the location of some of the notoriously violent incidents perpetrated by or visited upon that quarter.

Last year, I saw printed and matted copies of this very map being offered for sale on Ebay, but soon discovered that I could download a huge, highly detailed image file from the Library of Congress for free!


Ghod I love maps.
posted by Herodios at 9:54 AM on May 23, 2017 [2 favorites]

oh -- oh my -- oh my my

Chronology Delineated to Illustrate the History of Monarchical Revolution, published by Isaac Eddy, Westhersfield, Vermont (1813).

This tree chart shows the 'history' of European tribes and their chiefs (and how they are related) through time from Adam, via Ham, Shem, and Curley, through to Bonaparte.

“This Plan which at one view presents the means of examining with great facility the dates of all the most interesting epochs of History impresses upon the mind the order of all the revolutions of importance, and that with more precision than the reading of many volumes which must necessarily encumber the memory. Being represented under the form of a tree it expresses very naturally the birth of men descending from each other since the days of ADAM their common Father & exhibits branches growing out of their mother-stocks to be reproduced and multiplied without end.”

Ah. Thanks for this, PK.
posted by Herodios at 10:07 AM on May 23, 2017

Previously (way, way previously).
posted by languagehat at 11:16 AM on May 23, 2017 [1 favorite]

Outstanding. I love me some maps.
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:38 PM on May 23, 2017

Oh I love old maps, a.k.a. "how I discovered that I'm living over an old public cemetery that may or may not have been completely emptied".
posted by supercres at 3:02 PM on May 23, 2017

Wow! Thanks for this. I've wanted an old (pre-18th century) map of Indonesia (specifically the Mollucas and Banda) and now I not only did I find one but I can order a nice print of it.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:12 PM on May 23, 2017

This collection is enormous and important, I'm really glad it landed at Stanford last year. Over the years I've bookmarked a few nice examples

• 1750 Cassini map of France, the first large map based on geodetic surveys
• 1885 San Francisco Chinatown, a fun highly detailed map
• 1938 Aerial Map of San Francisco, "Google Satellite" from the 30s

The georeferenced view can be a bit brutal, but it sure is super convenient to browse from the comfort of a computer.
posted by Nelson at 4:17 PM on May 23, 2017

This is so excellent; best of all it has a very sophisticated and easy to use Export feature. Thanks, PussKillian!
posted by rmmcclay at 5:51 PM on May 23, 2017

Pretty sure I checked out a map-cataloging job at this collection a few years before the "previously" languagehat links above. At the time, it was housed in a really nice but not very large Victorian near Golden Gate Park (the collector's residence, I gathered at the time), the work was to be done in the living room and dining room, and the scanner was a huge thing stabilized on gel so that when the Stanyan bus rolled by the building didn't shake enough to blur details.
posted by goofyfoot at 6:16 PM on May 23, 2017 [2 favorites]

While most of my current borough did seem to be undeveloped 120 years ago, my street and neighborhood in NYC existed. I knew this already because my across-the-street neighbors all live in houses built around that time, but it's nice to see my street on a map from those days. The Metro North still goes over the same track areas as 120 years ago, too.

The streets I grew up on in the Midwest, however, on didn't exist until the late 1890s. That land was stockyards, of all things! And the last street I lived on before moving away for college, down the road is still a large tract of land that's a yard of sorts, but today it's for city buses instead of cattle.
posted by droplet at 7:09 PM on May 23, 2017 [1 favorite]

I read this as Dave Ramsey and thought it was about buying maps without a credit card.
posted by 4ster at 7:39 PM on May 23, 2017 [2 favorites]

And I was going to get some work done tonight...

Thank you for posting!
posted by Triplanetary at 8:41 PM on May 23, 2017