Another Genealogy Tool -- And A Proposed Project Idea To "Pay It Forward" (July 10, 2014)

Recently the United States Geological Survey (USGS) made over 178,000 of its survey maps available in a searchable on-line database called the "Historical Topographic Map Explorer." This tool makes available survey maps that go back as far as 1884 and they are searchable by city and town!  [See an item in this week's forthcoming "Saturday Serendipity" for more information and links.] 

This post is about my visit to the Historical Topographic Map Explorer to see how it works.  In doing so, I fell into a little memory game that strikes me as a potential basis for targeted neighborhood map projects that could become ways for those of us here today to "pay it forward" by providing useful information that might otherwise be easily lost to future generations and future genealogists.  I describe the memory game and project idea below -- with an example.

The screen shot shown above is a portion of a 1967 survey map for the town of Salem Depot, New Hampshire taken from a search for Salem Depot in the Historical Topographic Map Explorer.  I chose Salem Depot out of curiosity because it was a small developing community on the border of Lawrence, Massachusetts in the early 60s and it was not a large city that one would expect to definitely be covered in this database.  I also chose it because my family lived in Salem Depot for about three years (1960-1962).

As a glance at the map section above indicates,  Salem Depot was a residential community in the early 1960s that was expanding with new home developments.  One of the principal home builders at the time was a family-owned construction company that named the streets in its development by using the first names of children and other family members.  We lived in that development at 18 Joseph Road, Salem Depot, NH pictured here.

18 Joseph Rd., Salem, NH (March 2010)

In looking at the 1967 survey map of Salem Depot, I found myself tracing the streets to our development and to the little square that represented our home in 1960 - 1962.  I then found myself digging deep to recall the names of some, but far from all, of the other families that lived in our neighborhood.  I pointed to the squares of their homes and suddenly struck on the idea that probably none of those families are still there and that few if any people in that neighborhood today could say who lived in those houses some 50 or more years ago -- but isn't that information that could be of interest and of use to people researching family histories?  And so the idea for a neighborhood map project took hold and I produced for myself the map shown immediately below.

The annotated map above color codes my identification of our home on Joseph Road and the homes of the Sullivan, Patten, Conner, Grimes and Perrant families who also lived in the neighborhood in the early 1960s.  

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Screen shot of a portion of the 1967 USGS survey map for Salem Depot, NH obtained using the USGS Historical Topographic Map Explorer.

Photograph of 18 Joseph Rd., Salem, NH by the author (March 2010).

Annotated USGS map identifying family homes circa 1960 - 1962 by the author. 

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Copyright 2014, John D. Tew

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