I wrote a year ago about a map showing the distribution of men and women in America in 1890. Compare that map (taken from the David Rumsey Collection) to Richard Florida's Singles Map of the United States, based on 2006 Census Bureau data. Overlaying one map with the other (as I've clumsily done below) shows that things haven't changed much in 116 years. Men still predominate in the West; women still outnumber men in the East. And I still can't get a date.
Dana Huff sent me a link to this Strange Maps post about one state's condiment preferences.
The prevalence of this last sauce John Shelton Reed attributes to "the great 18th century wave of German immigrants to the Southern uplands."The map shows the state of South Carolina divided into four regions, according to the preferred style of condiment used on barbecued food.
- The vinegar and pepper region covers the eastern quarter of the state. This is “a southward extension of eastern North Carolina-style sauce,” states Mr Reed.
- “The tomato region ditto for North Carolina’s Piedmont- or Lexington-style sauce, which is basically the eastern sauce with a little tomato added, still thin and vinegar-flavored.”
- The ketchup region is influenced by what they serve in Georgia “and most of the trans-Appalachian South – or for that matter in grocery stores – a thick, sweet, ketchupy sauce.”
- Unique to South Carolina, though, is “the mustard sauce of central South Carolina, (which) is unique to that state, and (which) gives it more distinct barbecue regions than any other.”
An article on children's "right to roam" maps the meanderings of four generations of eight-year-olds in one English family.
The oldest member, George, was allowed to roam for six miles from home unaccompanied when he was eight.
His home was tiny and crowded and he spent most of his time outside, playing games and making dens.
His son-in-law, Jack Hattersley, 63, was also given freedom to roam.I turned eight in 1977, and was too busy watching Roots and compiling my family history to walk anywhere but cemeteries.
He was aged eight in 1950, and was allowed to walk for about one mile on his own to the local woods. Again, he walked to school and never travelled by car. [Link, via Boing Boing]
Google Maps now offers street-level photos of New York, Miami, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Denver. The shot at right is of Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
If they ever improve the resolution so we can read the inscriptions, it'll save us a lot of legwork.
If you found the Ken Burns Civil War series too long to watch, you might like this exhibit from the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
"The Civil War in Four Minutes," also known as The Electronic Map, is a map of the war with battle lines that continuously move, showing the changing progress of the war. Here, each week of the war has been condensed to one second. In the corner of the map, a casualty counter tracks the mounting butcher's bill - an odometer of death. [Link]
Alvin O. Hall—the Milton Bradley of Cincinnati, Ohio—was granted a patent on Jan. 25, 1881, for a game based on the 1880 census. It was to be played on two identical maps of the United States with blocks bearing the names of 48 census subdivisions ("thirty-eight States, nine territories, and one district"), and a like number of blocks bearing the number of inhabitants in each subdivision.
Either player, for instance No. 1, turns up a block [...] so that the name of the State can be seen, and then both guess at the population in 1880, and the one that has nearest approached the true figure takes the block and places it upon the corresponding State, and if he fails the block is returned to the rest; but if he guessed correctly the block remains on his map until all the blocks have been placed on the map, the player having the most blocks on his map being the winner.It is not known whether this game was actually inflicted upon the American public.
Among the additions made to the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection this weekend were Henry Gannett's statistical atlases for the 1890 and 1900 censuses. The maps show everything from the population densities of Presbyterians and Scandinavians to death rates due to consumption and typhoid fever. Presented on Plate No. 149 of the 1900 atlas is the "Number of Horses, Mules, and Asses per Square Mile."
Below is a detail from a map showing the "Predominating Sex" in 1890. Though most of the population schedules from that census have been lost, we can see that the East Coast was at that time overrun with females.
Historian Greg Koos has been working to republish nineteenth-century county atlases of McLean County, Illinois, and in the process has noted some peculiar details.
In the 1874 Atlas, a lithographer for the Dennis Kenyon farm in Mount Hope Township even took note of a damaged tree in the front yard. "Look at that tree," said Koos. "It's been blasted by lightning."
There also is a bit of whimsy that only the careful examiner catches.
In the drawing of the A. Kittle residence, Market and Hinshaw streets, Bloomington, 1874, people are standing on top of lawn ornaments. [Link]
There's good news for the 488 Georgia communities wiped off the map last month. Complaints from small-town residents have caused the state's transportation department to change its mind.
"We're glad they've seen the light," said Dennis Holt, who led a campaign to have the name of Hickory Level, a town of fewer than 1,000 people in western Georgia, put back on the map. "It gets back to respect for rural areas. We just wish we didn't have to go to all this trouble."
Locals say the state's original decision to remove towns without their own post office or zip code from the maps was shortsighted because it overlooked their status as the backbone of the country. [Link]
Here is a list of the 488 small Georgia towns wiped off the state map. I'd be proud to have an ancestor from any of them, but my favorites are Poetry Tulip and Hopeulikit.
Georgia has a new official map, but the cartographers decided that 488 communities were so small that no one would ever need to find them.
Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.
Gone are such places as Dewy Rose, Hemp, Experiment, Retreat, Wooster, Sharp Top and Chattoogaville, a spot in far northwestern Georgia that consists of little more than a two-truck volunteer fire department, a few farmhouses and a country store where locals fill up their gas tanks. [Link]Where I come from, a town of 2,500 people is considered a metropolis, and a fire department that gets a second truck is just showing off.
From the Oakland Tribune of Mar. 17, 1960:
QUIZ WHIZ NADLER FLUNKS JOB TESTSt. LOUIS, March 17—(UPI)—Teddy Nadler, who won $264,000 on television quiz shows, today lost a chance for a $13-a-day job as a census taker when he flunked the qualification test.Jack W. Traverse Jr., regional field director for the census bureau, said Nadler "did well on the first 30 questions but did not make the grade on the final 16."
The first part of the test consisted of multiple-choice questions on the definitions of words. The second part was a map comprehension section. The applicants were asked to do such things as indicating which of several buildings was nearest to a certain highway.
Traverse said Nadler apparently "got mixed up on east and west."
Nadler, once an obscure $70-a-week civilian clerk for the army, rose to fame and fortune on the $64,000 Challenge.Time Magazine was a bit more skeptical of Nadler's quiz-show success.
Challenge folded in 1958 during the quiz show scandals, but Nadler never was tainted by charges of "rigging."
eXpertGenealogy.com has an interesting map of professional genealogists. It appears that one enterprising researcher has set up shop halfway across the Atlantic—hoping, no doubt, to capture both the American and European markets.
The National Archives has partnered with iPHOTOART to produce high-quality prints of selected images from America's past.
All of the available images are great, but I especially like the vivid war posters. For those of you whose ancestors spent the World Wars sleeping off hangovers, check out the patent drawing of an 1808 alcohol still.Through this non-exclusive agreement, prints of selected Civil War Maps, World War I and II posters, patent drawings, lighthouse drawings, and Ansel Adams photographs are now available for purchase on the iPhotoart web site www.archivesprints.com. These striking images have been painstakingly reproduced from digital files housed at the National Archives, and are embossed with the National Archives official seal. [Link]
If you happen to carry around one of Britain's top 25,000 surnames, head over to the Surname Profiler—a new database that shows the origins of names, and maps their frequency and geographical distribution in the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If your name isn't included, try again later: they'll be adding another 250,000 in the future.
Searching for my own surname, I find that "Dunham" is very popular in Tasmania, which explains why my mail always end up there. In the U.S., the state with the highest rate of Dunhamhood is Maine—which happens to be the state where I keep my toothbrush. The rate of Dunhamhood in my bedroom on any given night is dizzyingly high.
The website also tells me that 22% of people have "a more rural name," while only 16% have "a more high-status name." I think that means that I'm more likely to be condescending than condescended to.
The best part of using the website was discovering that we Dunhams are a multiethnic family. Sure, 98.72% of us are classified as "English or unknown," but 0.12% are Greek or Greek Cypriot, 0.06% are Hispanic, 0.17% are Black African, 0.06% are Indian, and 0.23% are Muslims of some sort. We're almost as multiethnic as the U.S. Senate!
From The Boston (Mass.) Globe:
Dealer faces probe in map theftsSlicing maps out of old atlases has become rampant, and is a despicable practice. Soon the only copies of these treasures will be in libraries—though now it seems that not even these are safe.
'Perfect gentleman' is charged in Conn.
By Jenna Russell, Globe Staff | August 9, 2005
Seven rare and valuable maps are missing from five books at the Boston Public Library, and curators are searching for more holes in the collection, as a respected rare maps dealer who used the missing materials appears in court today on theft charges, the library's president said yesterday.
Curators at the Boston library began reviewing their collection earlier this summer, after E. Forbes Smiley III, a part-time resident of Martha's Vineyard, was arrested at Yale University in New Haven. He was scheduled to appear in a New Haven court today on charges of stealing maps worth more than $300,000 from a university library.
[snip]
[Read the whole story]
An interest in genealogy inevitably leads to other interests: whether Civil War re-enactment, tin-type photography, or, as in my case, cartography. 
I have found, both on- and off-line, dozens of historical maps of my corner of Maine, each of which adds something to my understanding of the region. Historical USGS Maps of New England and New York provides free topographical maps (often more than one for a particular area), while Old Maps of New England, New York & Pennsylania sells matted reproductions of 19th-century town maps which show exactly where each resident lived, where he went to church, and where his children went to school. The map collection at American Memory includes panoramic maps of many American towns.
And then there is the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, which "has over 11,000 maps online."
The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia and Africa are also represented. Collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, childrens and manuscript maps. The collection can be used to study history, genealogy and family history.
