| S&N
Genealogy Supplies has released a 2-disk CD-ROM set called, "1898
Bartholomew's Atlas." I had a chance to use this resource for a
bit this week.  Bartholomew's
Atlas is a standard reference in England, useful for many purposes besides
genealogy. These atlases of England and Wales were printed for many
years, showing details of every street in the country. The maps were
printed at a scale of four miles to an inch. The 1898 edition includes
town and city street maps, railways, and a lot of printed statistics,
along with a placename index that lists 35,000 locations. Looking for
an ancestor's location after finding him or her in the census records?
The 1898 Bartholomew's
Atlas includes many streets no longer in existence, either through development
or World War II bombing. The 1898 Bartholomew's
Atlas on CD-ROM is in Adobe Acrobat format. That's good, as it can be
used on Windows systems as well as Macintosh, Linux and several varieties
of UNIX. The CD-ROM set includes all the needed software for Windows. "Readers" for other operating systems can be downloaded at
no charge from Adobe's Web site. This CD-ROM contains
scanned images from the original printed books. These images are very
detailed, full-color maps, scanned at 300 dots per inch. I had some
difficulty reading them on the screen when first displayed. However,
the Adobe software allows the user to zoom in and out as needed. When
zooming in to higher-power magnification, the words became a lot clearer.
As I continued to zoom in further, the smaller details became visible.
At 1600% magnification, I was able to clearly see every road, footpath
and small hill. These maps are really detailed! The first CD-ROM contains
topographic maps of all England and Wales. The second CD-ROM contains
detailed street maps of all the larger cities. The two CD-ROM disks
contained scanned images of the original books published in 1898. The
index is very detailed but is simply a scanned image of the original
printed index. As a result, there are no hyperlinks directly to the
pages referenced. Still, I found it easy to navigate around these CD-ROM
disks. The images were very detailed and easy to view. I did find it
much easier to zoom in on the on-screen version to see fine details.
In fact, I could display a very small neighborhood on the screen in
a manner to see every street. The maps do not display individual houses,
however. Printing also was
easy, the same as in any modern Windows program. A black and white printer
will produce readable pictures, but you probably will prefer to print
these on a color inkjet printer. I printed a Birmingham street map on
a Hewlett-Packard 694c inkjet printer; street names were readable if
I used a magnifying glass. When using Adobe
Acrobat, the only method of printing, I could not find any method of
zooming in and printing a small section of the map. I could only print
a portion of an entire map; I suspect this printed area equates to the
same area as the Atlas shows on 8 by 10.5 inches of its actual page,
the whole of which might measure 12 by 15 inches or so. However, I did
find that I could zoom in on an on-screen display, make a screen capture
(using ALT-PrintScreen) and then paste the zoomed-in image into a word
processor or a paintbrush program. Then I could easily print the more
detailed image from that instead of printing from Adobe Acrobat. The
end result was a very detailed printout of a subsection of a map. The
disadvantage was that it required a few more steps to complete. The 1898 Bartholomew's
Atlas is a valuable resource for anyone searching for ancestors' homes
of that period. You can easily locate their addresses and then see the
surroundings in which they lived. The original books are almost impossible
to find these days. If you can find the atlas for sale, it probably
is rather expensive. It also consumes a large space on your bookshelf.
S&N Genealogy's
CD-ROM version of the 1898 Bartholomew's Atlas is much more practical;
it weighs a half ounce, is easier to use and only costs £19.95 (about
$32.00 U.S. funds) plus shipping. This article
is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 2002
by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of
the author. About the author: Dick Eastman is the forum manager of the
three Genealogy Forums on CompuServe. He also is the author of "YOUR
ROOTS: Total Genealogy Planning On Your Computer" published by
Ziff-Davis Press. |
