Year: 2014

Juneteenth, dating back to June 19^th, 1865, commemorates the end of slavery in the United States and many communities across the nation hold special celebrations.  In observance of this day, FamilySearch has announced the release of additional online Freedmen’s Bureau Records.  The new additions are currently viewable as digital images but the data will become searchable as volunteers create an index.

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (often called the Freedmen’s Bureau) was created in 1865 at the end of the American Civil War to supervise relief efforts including education, health care, food and clothing, refugee camps, legalization of marriages, employment, labor contracts, and securing back pay, bounty payments and pensions. These records include letters and endorsements sent and received, account books, applications for rations, applications for relief, court records, labor contracts, registers of bounty claimants, registers of complaints, registers of contracts, registers of disbursements, registers of freedmen issued rations, registers of patients, reports, rosters of officers and employees, special and general orders and circulars received, special orders and circulars issued, records relating to claims, court trials, property restoration, and homesteads.

Researchers examining this era or tracing family history back through time on the Delmarva Peninsula will find a lot of material to help them with their investigations.

I have only had a few minutes to examine this exciting primary source this morning, but here are the links to get you started.  The records have always been available, but a trip to the Archives was required to access them.  Be sure to read the full description of the records group, to get an idea of how to best approach this body of material.

Click here to view the records.

 

The Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library, and other virtual repositories have a series of detailed maps showing British operations on the upper Delmarva Peninsula, during the summer of 1777.  Several of these detailed products show the camps, movement, and engagements, as well as the general topographic nature of the region at that point.  Here are some samples.  You may want to check these out if this subject is of interest to you.  It is fascinating to be able to examine the details of the movements and the area, from multiple sources.

 

 

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.

I often need to access historical maps produced by the Office of the U.S. Coast Survey.  The agency started drawing charts in 1807 once President Thomas Jefferson created the division.  Over time the agency, now a part of NOAA, produced an enormous quantity of highly technical maps, including products that aren’t typically thought of as being part of this work.  As the first federal scientific agency the Survey produced land sketches, Civil War battle maps, and aeronautical charts.

These representations are helpful links to the past, but to review the materials one had to make arrangements through special repositories, such as the NOAA Central Library or the Library of Congress.  That changed, however, as a revolution in research methods got underway, allowing everyone to have easy access to resources on the World Wide Web.

The Division’s map and chart collection is a rich archive of high-resolution images capturing a vast wealth of the U.S. government’s historical survey and mapping.  The collection of over 35,000 scanned images – covering offshore and onshore sites – includes some of the Nation’s earliest nautical charts, city plans, and Civil War battlefield maps, according to NOAA.  Electronic copies are available for free download.

NOAA started assembling the collection in 1995 as a data rescue effort.  In time, as the web became more common, NOAA continued its preservation, while also increasing accessible virtually.

Today NOAA has an excellent portal for accessing the valuable products.  Visit the easy to use interface and type in search words or click on a spot of a map and many products around the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays will come up.

Click here for an easy to use interface to search for maps

Here is a link to another NOAA search engine