Google Maps with complete county lines and ZIP Codes; now also search using your current location

I received this information from Randy Majors, who has updated his website and added more features to his geographic search engines:

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You can now search using your current location on all randymajors.com Google Maps mapping tools (in addition to searching by place, address, etc.):

*  County Lines on Google Maps (covers U.S., U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Switzerland)

*  Historical U.S. County Boundary Maps

*  ZIP Codes on Google Maps

Latest write-up here: https://www.randymajors.com/2018/12/now-use-your-current-location-on-all.html

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Great stuff!  Thank you, Randy!

I searched for Dodge County, Wisconsin on the Historical U.S. County Boundary Maps site for "Cemeteries" (from dropdown menu) in 1880:

You can zoom in or out using Ctrl + Scroll on Windows computers.

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The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2018/12/google-maps-with-complete-county-lines.html

Copyright (c) 2018, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

The "Rivers of America" Map

Have you seen this map?  It shows the rivers and streams of America that end up flowing out of the Mississippi river into the Gulf of Mexico.

The map actually shows all of the rivers in the United States.  You can see it, and zoom in on specific areas, and track the course of a specific river, on the National Atlas website - see http://nationalatlas.gov/streamer/Streamer/streamer.html

On the National Atlas website, I zoomed into see the area around Cheyenne County, Kansas (the most northwest county in Kansas) because that is where my great-grandparents married in 1887.  Here is what I saw:

Up at the top of the map, there is a button on the menu line that says "Trace Downstream."  You can click on a point anywhere on a river and see the trace of that river downstream to where it ends up in the ocean.  Here is the trace for the Republican river which flows through Cheyenne County, Kansas:

By zooming in, I can see that the Republican River passes through McCook, Nebraska, Concordia, Kansas, and Clay Center, Kansas; all of those places are where the Devier Smith family resided during their lives.  The Republican eventually goes into the Missouri River at Kansas City, and the Missouri into the Mississippi River at St. Louis.

I wondered about the Colorado River - what is its' watershed area (what does it drain)?  Another button on the menu line at the top of the screen enables you to Trace Upstream."  I chose that, and clicked the cursor on the point where the Colorado enters the USA in Arizona, and saw:

I love maps!  This is one of the coolest maps I've seen.  As you can see, the different major river drainage systems in the USA are shown with green boundaries.

Why is this important to genealogists?  Because the rivers were one of the major means of transportation in the United States and colonial America before trains and automobiles and airplanes.  How did your ancestors travel to the places they resided?

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/07/the-rivers-of-america-map.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

FamilySearch Standard Finder - Post 1

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One of the projects on the FamilySearch Labs site is the Standard Finder. The Labs site describes it as:

"With Standard Finder you can search for a standardized name, date or place based on your input. The Standard Finder will present the standards that will be used in future releases of new FamilySearch. Come and try out your historical and current entries and understand how the system will interpret your input. Use filtered results to see what we think the best match would be or uncheck filtered results to see all the possible standards. Then send us feedback on how the system can do better."

There are five tabs on the Standard Finder site - for Name, Date, Place, Preview and Resources. In this post, we'll look at the first three tabs.

On the "Name" tab, I entered my surname "seaver" and saw:




The site provides variant spellings for the surname, apparently gleaned from some unknown list. A different list appears for "seaver" as a first name.

The "Date" tab provides some logical information. After some experimentation, I entered "3/5/1659" in the search field and saw:




The site said that the date was ambiguous - either 5 March 1659 or 3 May 1659. However, it didn't say that it was 5 March 1658/1659 or 5 March 1659/1660 which is what I expected to cover the double-date created by the Julian calendar issue.

The "Place" tab permits the user to type in a place name. I chose to put in "wano, kansas" since I've heard that Wano is a ghost town. Will it find it? Here is the result:

This screen has several links. There is one for the Place Name (Wano township > Cheyenne > Kansas > United States), one for the Geo Code (39.69028 N, 101.8125 W(, and one for the Identification Number (439087).

I clicked on the Place Name and saw:

There are 13 items on this list, mainly churches and cemeteries, plus the town of Saint Francis.

Clicking on the Geo code link brings up a Google map of the area with a stickpin locating Wano township.

The user can manipulate the Google map to zoom in or out, change to a satellite map or a hybrid map, etc. The map is much smaller than the Google map that you can use at http://maps.google.com . This is an excellent resource for finding the latitude and longitude of a place.

Why did FamilySearch create this Standard Finder tool? They are using the standard name, date and place entries for the rest of the new and improved FamilySearch web site - including the Record Search Pilot site, the FamilySearch Beta site and the new FamilySearch Family Tree site.

We'll look at the Preview and Resources tabs in the next post.