Susan Farrell Bankhead, Certified Genealogist (sm)
Friday’s Faves: SLIG Day Five!
This morning Thomas Jones led us through last night’s homework assignment.
Rick Sayre discussed “Rural and Urban Map Strategies: Analysis, Interpretation, and Correlation.” He talked about how to critically evaluate a map and correlate it with other information. David Rumsey’s site has 29,000 maps online deliberately selected and scanned for use. To use DeedMapper, we need to import a map as a a .jpg. The Library of Congress is the largest map repository with over five million maps, 80,000 atlases, but only 30,000 maps online. Their online catalog does not cover the whole collection. They are working on getting online Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps.
Sayre showed how to use Historic Map Works (www.historicmapworks.com). It is subscription based but available for searching at the FHL. You may download the .jpg file of it, blow it up, and overlay it on a GoogleEarth map. HistoryGeo.com (subscription site) has 40,000 maps in electronic form. It is starting to add Cadastral Atlases showing property ownership.
The National Archives has 1.4 million maps. Sayre counseled us to compare the source and date of the data with the date the map was prepared. Topographic maps are two dimensional to depict a three dimensional site. Use topographic maps to plot deeds in DeedMapper.
Claire Bettag discussed, “Federal Land Records at the National Archives.” She lectured on how the land records are organized, the process for obtaining land, and how to access the records: cash and credit sales, preemptions, donations, homesteads, and bounty lands. Preemptions were the right to squat on land and later have first rights to purchase it. Preemptions are mixed in with the cash files and the claim includes their citizenship, marital status, children, date settled on the claim, etc.
Thomas W. Jones taught “Correlating Sources, Information, and Evidence to Solve Genealogical Problems,” and “Writing Genealogy.”
He handed out completion certificates.
Tonight is the banquet. While eating we’ll congratulate and commiserate with each other about our achievement of completing the course and of not enough energy to continue. Lou Szucs will address us with her wit and wisdom.
Tonight UGA/SLIG will announce the courses for SLIG 2013. I’m sure you’re dying to know! Get out your calendars. In my next blog I’ll post the lineup.
Related posts: Monday, Monday, So Good to Me: SLIG Day One; Tuesday’s Treasures: SLIG Day Two; Wednesday’s Wonders: SLIG Day Three; Thursday’s Thrills: SLIG Day Four; SLIG Lineup 2013.
I have loved reading your daily updates. I am envious of your experience this week. You really got wonderful information. I hope you absorbed as much as possible. I am exhausted just reading about all you learned.
Pam: I’m exhausted too. Brain fried, in fact, but it’s all so good. I’m glad you loved the daily updates. It makes writing at 11:00 at night worth it. Thanks!
I got home from SLC today and started trying to get caught up from the week, and was so excited to read your day-by-day run-downs of class. The instructors gave out so much a ton of great information last week, didn’t they? I was glad to have been in class with you this week, though we were all scurrying around so much we didn’t have a lot of time to chat. Thanks again for posting the wonderful run-down of the week, and hopefully I’ll get to see you again somewhere. ~Nikki
Nikki: It was great to meet you and I hope to see you at more events. You’re right about it being a crazy week. Hopefully we’ll be able to remember all that we learned! Thanks for commenting on my blog. I appreciate it.