Birds' Eye Maps?

Perhaps your first thought upon reading that post title was that it was going to be something about birds making maps? Nope.

Wikipedia explains: A bird's-eye view is an elevated view of an object from above, with a perspective as though the observer were a bird, often used in the making of blueprints, floor plans, and maps. It can be an aerial photograph, but also a drawing.

Wikipedia didn't say when these specialty maps began but posted one for Paris in 1850. 

If you'd enjoy seeing a birds' eye map of Spokane, there is one hanging on the wall outside the Northwest Room in the downtown Spokane library. (Hurry; library closes in Jan for two years.)

Historic Map Works Purchases Metsker Maps

Historic Map Works is pleased to announce the acquisition of Metsker Maps, the long running map publishing business from Tacoma, Washington.

During their almost century long run, the Metsker family produced approximately 300 county atlases and 400 county wall maps of Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, and Northern California. Scanning the newly acquired maps will add approximately 10,000 images to the 1.2 million map related images already available on www.HistoricMapWorks.com. You can read more about these historic maps and see examples of our first scans from the new collection here.

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On a personal note, my husband and I have been using Metsker maps over the course of the last 22 years, for camping, history, local road trips, and the like. They are very common here in Washington, and it's not unusual to see them in any hardware or convenience store. The fact that they were only limited to the West is news to me; I thought they had mapped the entire U.S., and always planned to purchase some for my ancestral locations:

Unlike many publishers of the time who limited themselves to publishing maps of more developed areas, the Metsker family excelled at recording the history of the then rural and wilderness geographies. Many of our users already use Metsker Maps to study the boundary changes to state and national parks as well as helping land use enthusiast to locate former logging trails, timber camps, gold mines, and other areas of industry which flourished and then quietly faded away during the Northwest's various booms and busts. In many instances, the only way to locate these now ghost towns and overgrown roads is to look on a map published by Metsker Maps.

New Titles in the Genealogy Room: Land Patent Books

EWGS librarian Juanita McBride announced that the society recently purchased five volumes of the Family Maps series of land patent books with the 2009 Memorial Book fund. These include all the volumes currently available for Washington and Idaho:

• Spokane County - WA
  
• Whitman County - WA
• Walla Walla County - WA
• Asotin County - WA
• Kootenai County - ID
  
• Latah County - ID

The following is a description of these volumes from the publisher's website and author, Gregory A. Boyd:

The Family Maps series of Land Patent Books are published county by county, state by state, for original settlers whose purchases are indexed in the U.S. Bureau of Land Management database. For the first time, you can locate your ancestor's federal land purchase by simply finding them in a surname index, then an all-name index, which directs you to a map of first-land-owners. And now you can learn who your ancestors' neighbors were! The Family Maps books are a helpful visual reference tool that make your federal lands research easier than ever.

Each Township has a Patent Map, Patent Index, Road Map, and a Map we call an Historical Map, which includes Waterways, Watercourses & Railroads. The Road and Historical Maps also include the City-centers and cemeteries that can be found at NationalAtlas.gov. There is also a Surname/Patent Index and a Surname/Township Index to help you dive into the right area of the County. Included Appendices identify multi-Patentee buying groups and also list the numerous Aliquot (section) parts you might find.

Attorney, genealogist, and software engineer, Gregory A. Boyd, has mapped the federal land patents (original land-owners) contained in the indexes of the Bureau of Land Management and Arphax Publishing brings you the resultant new books each week. Each volume provides you maps of indexed federal land patents for a county, with one map per Congressional township. Also included are two additional maps per township that geo-reference the land-tracts to existing roads, waterways, communities, cemeteries, railroads, etc. The Patent Maps are essentially plat-maps, but contain first land-owners, no matter what year they acquired the tract.

This series provides the best tool ever for re-constructing frontier neighborhoods, migration-patterns, and devising maiden-name possibilities. Many "burned" counties magically become researchable, thanks to these tools being generated from Federal records.

These titles are held in the Genealogy Room on the third floor of the Downtown Branch of the Spokane Public Library at 906 W. Main Avenue. With the branch now being open on Mondays, you will have even more opportunities to utilize the many genealogical resources there!