GIS and genealogical resource: Atlas of Historical County Boundaries
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
My cartography project, as i finished up my GIS certificate, focussed on the changes of county boundaries in Georgia, where i had grown to be aware that just because someone was born in a certain county at one point, the records might now in be another.
I did look, at that time,look for shapefiles i could use, geospatial data that would show the “dance of county lines.” I could find digitized old maps, but no consistent set of line data.
Today i discover,
“he Newberry Library is pleased to announce the completion and release of its Digital Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, a dataset that covers every day-to-day change in the size, shape, location, name, organization, and attachment of each U.S. county and state from the creation of the first county in 1634 through 2000.
Useful details are :
The data are organized by state and are available online in four versions:
* Viewable, interactive maps (electronic analogues to printed maps) on which the historical lines have been plotted against a background of the modern county network
* Downloadable shapefiles for use in geographic information systems (GIS)
* Downloadable KMZ files for use with Google Earth
* Downloadable and printable PDF files (each full-page frame shows a map of a different version of each county, with the historical boundaries displayed against a background of the modern county network)
Supplementing the polygons and maps for each state are chronologies, commentary on historical problems, long and short metadata documents, and a bibliography.
The project began in 1988, with principal funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency. Additional support came from the Newberry Library, which also served as headquarters, and from other foundations and individuals. The Newberry Library is the copyright holder; all files of the Digital Atlas of Historical County Boundaries are free for use under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Creative Commons License.
For genealogists, the website itself will be a rich resource.
There’s an overview of the history of each and every county: consider this example of Early County, Georgia. To create a link to the overview of the particular county within the document for the state, use the Index of Counties and Equivalents. For a statewide understanding of county boundaries, consider the Consolidated Chronology of State and County Boundaries
I would think that every USGenWeb county editor would want to link to this resource for their county to support their existing county mapping resources.
For cartographers, neocartographers, and genealogists, there is good documentation to help users understand the different resources offered by the site.
For a quick look at the data outside of the interactive map on the website, one can use Google Earth:
Since the KMZ file is time-coded, the Google Earth time slider will automatically appear. This time slider can then be used to view the boundaries at a specific date, or to view an animation of the state’s boundary changes over time. The time slider properties can be adjusted to modify the animation speed, or to view a smaller time span in more detail.
With Google Earth, it is possible to compare the historical county boundaries with geographical features such as rivers, lakes, and mountain ridges. The historical boundaries can also be compared to a large variety of layer information available in Google Earth, such as streets, populated places, and modern administrative boundaries.
I know i have loaded data that began as KML into my GPS unit in the past: i don’t recall whether it was just lines and points or if it has included boundaries. Given a GPS unit that could load boundaries, i can imagine it being very useful to be able to take the historical county boundaries with one while traveling on research.
I hope the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Creative Commons License will not put off too many folks. I’m passionate about copyright issues, but I am not a lawyer. I’m a fan of the work Creative Commons does to facilitate the rapid dissemination of ideas in our culture, in a manner that matches the technological speed of delivery. Personally, i like the “ShareAlike” clause. To explain how the clause works, if someone took one of my photos of my cats and added captions, they too must offer their captioned image of my photo under the same license. I’ve often simply used Attribution-ShareAlike, because i am not likely to have commercial interests threatened by any use of my offerings. If someone wanted to use my map of Georgia in their book or their blog that has advertisements, they can as long as they offer the image with attribution.
The Attribution and ShareAlike clauses are instructions to the person copying or creating a derivative work; the “noncommercial” clause in this license creates a test. As a reminder: the presence of a Creative Commons License does not remove fair use rights. It’s interesting, however, to see the spectrum of uses between “non-commercial” and fair use.
To start with non-commercial use, consider USGenWeb. USGenWeb does not have ads, does not charge, and explicitly states that it is keeping information freely available for genealogists. The reproduction and redistribution of the historical county boundary line data by USGenWeb is in the clear. Ancestry.com would not pass the non-commercial test, and fair use would never allow reproduction and redistribution of full data sets.
Is non-commercial use always easy to determine?
Creative Commons noncommercial licenses include a definition of commercial use, which precludes use of rights granted for commercial purposes:
… in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.
This may seem pretty clear cut, particularly when considering a website that has advertisements on it. But what if the advertisements merely subsidize the cost of the servers? The Creative Commons has published a study where creators and users were asked to classify certain uses as commercial or noncommercial. [PDF and data available from here.] It’s an interesting read. One point they bring up is how differently creators and consumers judge the question above if the website is for a nonprofit entity.
So what of the work of genealogists for hire? A cartographer producing a map for a book? A scholarly paper? It’s worth considering that many uses of this county boundary data by a genealogist or cartographer may easily fall under Fair Use, not the CC license. From Wikipedia:
Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work under a four-factor balancing test. [See the article for the four part test.]
Some “Fair Use” uses will enable monetary compensation: fair use can be “commercial” in the sense that a reviewer may excerpt from a work in a review for which the reviewer receives monetary compensation. Using a few county boundaries in a map on a website that is supported by advertising may be considered fair use. An analysis of fair use and GIS data can be found here. Despite the saying that it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission, if you were to have any questions, contact the Scholl Center Staff at the Newberry Library. I rather expect that they don’t bite.
