Tuesday Tips: County Formation Maps

As usual, I’m providing a tip on something I’m sure most of you have at least seen and possibly also used. However, in the slight chance someone hasn’t seen it or has forgotten about this resource, I thought I’d mention one of my favorite tools, the (animated) county formation map.

Most of us have probably had to deal at one time or another with the issue of changing county boundaries. In these cases, the county-level resources we use depend on the dates of residence of our ancestors. For instance, for my Floyd and Finley families in Illinois for the years spanning 1807 to 1860, I need to check both Greene and Jersey County records. One way to find this out can be to check county-specific sites such as Genweb sites, but a quick way to do this when you need to is to bookmark a couple of sites: Historical County Lines and the Family History 101 county formation map site where you can quickly refer to them. And if you are a visually oriented person or just a map geek, the latter site in particular is a lot of fun. The really neat thing is that you can choose the time frame you are interested in, progress through the years at your own rate by clicking, or press “play” for the full automated map show.

Please tell me that I am not the only one who has sat and watched the animated map for all 50 states.

Maps!

One of the unexpected and therefore all the more delightful aspects of genealogy for me has been the role played by maps in ancestor research. When I began my research, my expectations for the amount and specificity of the information I would find were very low. As I started to explore sites such as the GenWeb location-specific sites, the discovery of local maps made during the period my ancestors lived in the area and showing the location of the towns, farms, and other important sites was absolutely amazing. I hope to use these maps during future trips to locate the general areas where my ancestors' farms were situated.

Above is an 1877 map of the townships of Hopewell and Garvin in Anderson County, South Carolina found on a delightful webpage (http://www.geocities.com/williamston_sc/Township.html) on Williamston, S.C. created by Wendy Campbell. The farm of my great-grandfather Harlston Perrin ("H.P.") Moore (and his father Spencer Moore before him) is located just above the "H" and "O" in Hopewell, near Twenty-Six Mile Creek. The timing was fortunate, as H.P. and Martha Moore moved from South Carolina to Texas in 1877. To enlarge the view, just click on the map.