Thursday, January 7, 2016

Public Domain Maps in New York Public Library Collection

Jonathan Crowe, the writer of The Map Room blog, highlighted the New York Public Library Public Domain Documents today.  There are over 180,000 documents, and over 21,000 maps in this collection, all available to view online and to download for further review.

The New York Public Library Public Domain Documents page is  http://www.nypl.org/research/collections/digital-collections/public-domain:


Searching for "maps" brings up this page - http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/search/index?utf8=%E2%9C%93&keywords=map&filters%5Brights%5D=pd#


I reviewed a number of them, and picked an 1843 map of the entire state (with an inset of New York City).


I could zoom in only a bit on the online map, but further down the screen is information for the map and the green buttons to download the map for a range of dots per inch:


I chose the "Original" button, and downloaded the 1843 map to my computer.  It was 5,699 kb.

I then opened the map image with my Photo program, and was able to zoom in quite far before it lost resolution.  Here is a screen shot of Erie County:


There are a lot of historical maps on the site, and many maps of New York City from colonial to modern times.

This is a tremendous website, and a real boon to New York researchers like me.  I did not find any cadastral maps of the counties, which may have farm owner names in each section or town, but I may have missed them in my review of the site.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2016/01/public-domain-maps-in-new-york-public.html

Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cadastral (new word for me) maps? Wow, how I'd like to find some spanning years 1800-1850 for Ontario County and nearby counties in New York state as I research Crandall ancestors!

Chad said...

Ancestry has cadastral maps for the entire United States, with the land owners indexed. They can also be browsed by state and then by county.

http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1127

The NY maps do not start early enough to help Summeraboard, but perhaps someone else might find them useful.