Got a township & range where your ancestors had land? Got Google Earth?

[WritersBlock]

This may be old hat to some of you, but I have just discovered that you can look at townships & ranges on Google Earth! Yippee!!

First off, if you haven't downloaded Google Earth, it's free here: http://earth.google.com/

Then, once you've installed it, go here http://www.earthpoint.us/townships.aspx and click on View on Google Earth. You should be prompted to save a .kml file. Put it on your desktop or someplace you can remember it.

Then go into Google Earth, select File / Open, and choose the .kml file you just downloaded. Zoom in fairly closely; close enough that you can make out lakes, towns, & rivers.

Then, go back to http://www.earthpoint.us/townships.aspx and click the same View on Google Earth button again. If you're zoomed in closely enough on an area that is part of the PLSS system, you should see nifty little purple & orange boxes overlaid on the map. Give it a little time, and you'll get a folder called "Townships" inside your Temporary Places folder. From there, you can click on the township you're interested in, and GE will zoom right to it.

I imagine you can probably get overlay files for places like Texas that are on the metes & bounds systems, but I don't know enough about Google Earth and all this mapping stuff to be able to do that yet. If anyone knows how, please could you post it here for us?

[Bitwit1234]

1. And to really find where your ancestors lived

a lot of states are listing land grants, and land registers. Maryland just did this. I had no relatives in Maryland til the 1900's so I wouldn't find them but if you all do those places are a good place to start. I found my son's grand parents and great uncles in North Dakota land grants and in Minnesota land grants. They are all free.

[fudge stripe cookays]

3. Yup,

I ordered about 5 or 6 of our homestead records for the folks who homesteaded in North Dakota (and later found out where to order from the Canadian government for the ones who headed for Alberta).

All SORTS of information about the size of their farms, how big the barns were, if they had chicken coops, grain silos, how many pigs, cows and horses, etc.

Really helped me flesh out the story a little more.

[Drunken Irishman]

2. I wish they had some better aerial views of Ireland.

Some of my family came over from Aclare, which is a really small town in County Sligo. It would be neat to look at. I have found one photo of the village online, thanks to Wiki.

[Cybergata]

4. I've been google earthing Ancesters home towns . . .

for a while. I have been (in the real world, not google world) to everywhere in NM where my New Mexican ancestors have lived since 1598, but I've only by accident, been to a few of my mother's ancestors location oh and yes, even some of my father's Spanish ancestors locations in Spain. I've googled all over Spain, England, Mexico, Massachusetts, Maine and Connecticut.

Google just keeps adding wonderful new tools and making old ones better. For anyone doing English Peerage genealogy, Google has most of Burke's works, they just added Cockney's Complete Peerage, and one of my favorites, Collin's Peerage. Even better are some of the works by the Lancashire & Cheshire Historical societies that date back to the mid 1800s. I've even found NEHGS Registers in google books. It is much easier to read them on Google than it is on their own site.