Kosciusko County and Many Other Maps On Line

Dick Eastman broadcast a nice local digital newspaper story about the Kosciusko County, Indiana, Historical Society placing grave listings and photographs on line as part of the county's GIS mapping system for properties.

But there's more to the story: The web site is part of a multi-county service called Beacon: Local Government GIS for the Web. Kosciusko and 26 other Indiana counties also have multi-purpose zoomable GIS maps and searchable information on current properties under this format. Four counties in Illinois (Cass, Morgan, Ogle, and Whiteside), one in Michigan (Berrien), and several in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, and South Dakota also have this feature. So far as I've been able to tell, Kosciusko is the only place going the extra mile with the cemetery database and images bonus. (So it is now possible to cross-check these against other on-line listings such as Find a Grave, as well as non-digital published readings.)

Just click on the "All States" drop-down menu and pick your favorite state and county (if available) and spend some time with the maps. They don't have all the features genealogists would want by any means, but they have a lot.


Harold Henderson, "Kosciusko County and Many Other Maps On Line," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]