The Right Map for the Road Trip

On any genealogy research trip, there's always something I wish I had thought to bring. Sometimes it's a piece of equipment like a charge cord for the cell phone. More often it's a piece of information that I forgot to upload, or I'm in a place where I need it on paper because there's no wi-fi.

Yesterday I was grateful to have brought along a must-have for anyone planning to work on tax lists or property records (I had both): a good map of the subdivisions of the county I was working on, which in the case of Michigan means a township map. And Michigan has a lovely one; I wish every state did it this well. Unless you know by heart the township and range of every township in your federal-land county, you need it too. How else will you realize (for instance) that the 1875 tax list is organized by township, not alphabetically but in order from the southeast corner to the northwest corner?!

Actually I could have used one other thing -- a list of all the former names of townships. But since only one or two had changed, there was a workaround.


Harold Henderson, "The Right Map for the Road Trip," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]