Historic Maps From All over the Delmarva Peninsula

Researchers have an almost unimaginable quantity of online resources to help with local and family history studies, these days.  And the historical materials grow rapidly with each passing year, creating treasure-troves of sources waiting to be harvested by inquiring types.

This information revolution makes volumes of virtual records easily findable, sharable, and accessible.  But this data explosion, which helps us better interpret the past, creates a new challenge, locating and managing the online resources.

Content curation tools help in this area.  They are generally cloud based personal information management systems, which have as a core function, organizing our higher quality resources.  You collect and add items into a cloud based library, which is available to anyone on the web.  Many of them function just like a bookmark, but it’s in the cloud, and some also provide additional resources, such as highlighting, notes, and better graphics.

I have set up a map curated resources page on a virtual site called liiist, to test one.   On this site, I have a page called Old Delmarva Maps.  As maps are one of those areas where we are seeing growth, there are now so many products available online, but unless you are regularly navigating the search engines and the key virtual archives, it can be hard to find the materials.  So I added links to maps from all over the Peninsula, which I use for research.  The idea is to help anyone working on a project find the better quality items.

I often find that I am helping genealogist, students, and local history researchers locate these materials on the Net so this is a way to more broadly share the e-collections.  On the site, you will find maps from all over the Delmarva Peninsula, from Claymont, DE and Bald Friar, MD. to Cape Charles, VA., and every point in between.  There are county and state atlases, Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, large wall maps, coastal charts, topo maps, and lots more.

At this point, the titling convention I used for the bookmark headlines, in order to create some organization on the page for the first time visitor, was:  (1) MAPS — links directly to a cartographic products;  (2) Search – links to search engines and there are plenty of maps so be sure to search for anything that interests you; and (3) ARTICLES – posts about using maps.

I’m also looking at Pearltree, Diigo, and a few others, but want to test the social media tools to see which best help the local history and genealogy community.

Click here to go to Old Maps of Delmarva.