The Canadian County Atlas Digital Project
digitised all Canadian atlases published between 1874 and 1881. The Ontario atlases can be searched by the name of the property owner shown on the township map; the search results are linked to the location on the map, and any related portrait or property sketch. Lakeshore Genealogical Society offers an enhancement that compares these historic maps for Northumberland County then (and Hope Township which it now includes) to our current geography by overlaying them on Google Earth. The digital images of the maps are courtesy of Rare Books & Special Collections, McGill University Library. Benefits
System RequirementsDownload and install Google Earth for Desktop | Free for PC, Mac or Linux to a suitable computer, i.e., one with adequate drive space, RAM and graphics memory as summarised here. As Google Earth works with now-ancient Windows XP, the hardware requirements may not be very demanding but inadequacies will manifest as jerky and slow zooming and display. A good Internet connection is also needed because the image files total in the tens of megabytes, not to mention the data from the Google Earth database itself. As of Feb 2014, the Google Earth Plugin for web browsers and Earth View in Google Maps do not seem capable of rendering this imagery correctly. The Google Earth for mobile apps renders the digital map imagery correctly but provides no control over them, i.e., turning off/on, varying transparency, etc. ProcedureSummary: download the KMZ file, open it with Google Earth, use its controls to select which maps to show, zoom, vary transparency, etc.
For more on how to use Google Earth, please refer to its Help Resources and the Google Earth Community under its main menu Help. We hope that you find 1878 Northumberland in Google Earth to be a useful complement to the Canadian County Atlas Digital Project. Your comments are welcome via Contact. Accuracy & ResolutionThere is no perfect match between the images of the 1878 maps and Google earth despite sliding, stretching and squeezing them every which way - a "best fit" was sought for major roads and streets. Google Earth's own Roads graphics do not align exactly with the satellite imagery. We do not know what level of care was taken in drafting the original maps to scale, based on what quality of survey data. Some village maps are little better than sketches. Add distortions in printing, dimensional changes in the paper due to age, and scanning difficulties and some area of a map may align well but others are way off. The image files themselves are reported to be 72dpi resolution on the Canadian County Atlas website and are just barely readable due to the low resolution and JPG compression. However, that keeps the file sizes moderate, important for reasonable response time over the internet and for rendering speed. Higher resolution 300 dpi TIF files may be ordered from the McGill Library for more detailed examination for a fee but high resolution images with watermarks can be examined freely online at Historic MapWorks. Copyright & CreditsMap images from The Canadian County Atlas Digital Project, courtesy of Rare Books & Special Collections, McGill University Library, and overlaid on Google Earth courtesy of Lakeshore Genealogical Society. Reuse in whole or in part is permitted provided this statement is included in all instances. The original source is Illustrated historical atlas of the counties of Northumberland and Durham, Ont. Toronto : H. Belden & Co., 1878; originals and reprints are accessible in many libraries and archives. |
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