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Historic Map Works is a collection of 19th and early 20th century city, town, and county maps. The detailed maps usually show every building and every street in each city or town. Each single-dwelling home contains the name of the family who resided there, either on or beside the building on the map. Apartment complexes contained the property owner’s name.
The new site should be of interest to history buffs, genealogy searchers, and real estate agents. Can you imagine the realtor listing the details of a family that used to live in the house being offered for sale? I suspect that amount of detail might increase the sale price!
The maps are visible on the web site free of charge while higher quality printed maps are offered for sale.
Historic Map Works provides the following description of their site:
Based in Portland Maine, Historic Map Works, LLC is an Internet company formed to create a historic digital map database of North America and the world. Drawing on the largest physical collection of American property atlases of its type, it is our aim to be the single best online destination for map enthusiasts and researchers alike.
In addition to our own atlas collection, we
incorporated our scans of the antiquarian world map collection from the
Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education located at
the University of Southern Maine. Combining these collections allows site
visitors a vast amount of information spanning several centuries of
cartographic information.
Historic Map Works’s map collection includes:
United States Property Atlases
Antiquarian Maps
Nautical Charts
Birdseye Views
Special Collections (Celestial Maps,
Portraits, and other historical images)
Directories and other text documents
The vast majority of our database was created
by scanning an original map at a high resolution by our team of highly
skilled image technicians. After scanning, this team processes out the
major imperfections while maintaining the look of an antiquarian map.
Maps are then uploaded and cataloged for
viewing on our website. Our technicians geocode each map to a modern map
to enable the search by address function. Linking the historic images in
our database with geocode data allows visitors to search by modern day
address or latitude and longitude coordinates. Other methods to view our
maps include browsing by geographic location as well as searching our maps
via keywords, town names, makers names, or simply by year.
Prints and giftware are offered for the vast
majority of images on our site. A Giclee printing process is used to
create the images ordered from our site ensuring an archival print that
will remain vibrant for years to come.
