Frequently Asked Question
John H. Long was the editor and historical compiler of The Altas of Historical County Boundaries.
History of the Atlas
The Atlas was conceived in 1975 after historians working on the Atlas of Early American History (1976) at the Newberry Library in Chicago discovered the nearly complete lack of reliable maps of American counties in the revolutionary and early national periods. The U.S. Historical County Boundary Data File Project was launched in 1976 at the Newberry to fill that void in the historical literature by creating a cartographic database of county boundaries for the period from 1788 to 1980. Principal funding was provided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, with additional support from private individuals and foundations and the Newberry, which served as sponsor and headquarters. The choice of an electronic product was based upon a desire to adopt the most economical mapmaking practices-gains in efficiency over manual practices was a theme emphasized by proponents of the then new cartographic technology-and to demonstrate the applicability of that technology to historical cartography. The cartographic laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, performed the digital cartography. As the first project of its type, the Newberry undertaking necessarily had a strong experimental quality; it was, in effect, an early version of the current Atlas.
Once news of the project spread, many potential users asked that the data also be published in the traditional form of books because few of them had access to the facilities needed to utilize a cartographic database. By late 1982, when the project concluded, staff had compiled data on the evolution of county boundaries in fourteen states during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The results were disseminated in five volumes published by G. K. Hall, the Historical Atlas and Chronology of County Boundaries, 1788-1980 (1984), and in a cartographic database, County Boundaries of Selected United States Territories/States, 1790-1980 (ICPSR 9025), deposited with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in Ann Arbor.
The current Atlas was launched in 1987 to complete the work that had commenced in the 1970s, to provide reliable and accessible data on historical county changes for the entire nation. The earlier work had indicated that the research could be successfully extended into the colonial period, so the scope was enlarged, and some technical changes were made in methodology (e.g., the new project would deal with boundary changes as a series of polygons rather than as coded line segments that were the mechanism in the first project) to facilitate data handling and proofing. Nonetheless, the successful outcome of the earlier project set the initial production goals of this Atlas; that is to disseminate the data in two forms, a traditional multi-volume book and a cartographic database. All work, from historical compilation through computerized mapmaking, was concentrated at the Newberry. As in the first undertaking, the National Endowment for the Humanities provided the principal funding, the Newberry served as sponsor and home base, and private individuals and foundations contributed significant additional support.
From the beginning, the strategy was to organize the operation into two stages. First, publish the printed volumes as the data for each state and its counties were compiled, a process that would take several years to complete the country, and, second, defer the cartographic database until the entire nation had been compiled and published. The computer work would be sure to benefit from improvements in electronic mapmaking since the start of the project, and all states and counties could be digitized together. In the event, that original strategy was undone by the unexpectedly rapid advances in the applications of computers to traditional print publication, to cartography-especially geographic information systems (GIS)-and their effect on the markets for printed atlases and for cartographic databases; all together those developments pushed the Atlas project into the production of a digital cartographic product much earlier than anticipated. The net result is that the original plan for the Atlas has been realized in the form of a cartographic database covering all states and counties and available at this Website, plus nineteen printed volumes covering the historical county boundaries of twenty-four states and the District of Columbia. A list of those books and related publications follows.
AniMap 4.0
AniMaps 4.0 uses the KML shape files and data from this project for a more concise presentation for genealogical and historical researchers that know more about the names and places than they do about the dates.
AniMap 4.0 uses research methods starting at state level, then county level, concluding with dates of changes to the counties, including boundary changes helping researchers to better relate a historical look during the years they are researching.