Confused By County Boundaries? Here's Some Help

Thanks to Tami over at Relatively Curious About Genealogy for reminding me about the problem with historical county boundaries and a great FREE resource to determine the exact boundary in a given year.In her recent blog post, Tami discusses the problems involved with trying to pin down the county boundaries for certain states. With many of my ancestors in New York, I have learned the history of county boundaries and I have been able to memorize when those boundaries shifted.Because historical county boundaries have been such a problem, I was working on a lookup widget that people could insert into their websites and blogs which would allow you to select a state, a county and then see when it was formed and the original counties from which it was formed.Well, The Newberry Library here in Chicago where I live has come up with a great resource called the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. The best feature is the Interactive Maps which allow you to select a year and see the boundaries for each county. And there is even a metadata section which lists Bibliography and Sources, Commentary and more.Here is the New York map for July 4, 1776: http://historical-county.newberry.org/website/New_York/viewer.htm© 2009 Thomas MacEntee

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Confused By County Boundaries? Here's Some Help

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