Have you ever looked at a Sandborn Map? The University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library recently added more of them to its digital collection of historic maps. Genealogists can use these maps to learn a little bit more about their ancestors, especially if those ancestors lived in Utah.
The Sandborn Maps are a series of maps designed by a surveyor named D.A. Sandborn. They are of commercial, industrial and residential sections of various cities. The maps were created between 1867 and 1969.
The purpose of creating these detailed maps was to assist agents at fire insurance companies to determine the risk that was connected to a particular piece of property. In other words, these maps were important pieces of information that were used by insurance companies when they did an appraisal of someone’s property or home.
Overall, there are over 1.2 million Sandborn maps of around 12,000 cities from all across the nation. These maps are colorful, full of details, and many were created by hand. Each map contains information about the size and shape of each building, as well as the types of construction materials that were used.
You can see where the fire walls and windows were located. There are notes about the thickness of walls, if there were any cracks in the exterior walls, and if the building had an elevator. You can find out how far away each building or home was from the next one, and how wide the sidewalks and streets were.
If you would like to view some of the Sandborn maps, that correspond to twenty-six of the cities in Utah, you can easily do that online. The University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library just added a 77% increase to its collection of Sandborn maps. There are now over 1.950 that have been digitized so that more people can see them.
Genealogists who are interested in learning more about the homes that their ancestors lived in, what their neighborhood might have looked like, or more about the places they worked can use the Sandborn maps to find out. This is a good way to learn more about the history of a home, something that a lot of people have become interested in doing.
The maps also might be a way to help track down more information about your ancestors. The homes we live in can tell a lot about the day to day lives of the people living inside it. Did your ancestor’s home have the plumbing required for running water? Was your ancestor’s family using an outhouse? Did he or she have a reasonable amount of privacy, or was the next house located incredibly close to their home? Was there a garden? You can compare how many bedrooms there were to how many children were in the family.
Image by Scott Weir on Flickr