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Websites new to our list for 2021 are indicated by an asterisk (*). Sites marked with a dollar sign ($) require a subscription or other payment to fully take advantage of their content; otherwise free sites that have some sort of premium tier or paid add-on have this noted in the write-ups.
All summaries written by David Fryxell
What county were your ancestors in, and when? Get the answers with these interactive maps of shifting county lines from Chicago’s Newberry Library.
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Modern digital technology meets a classic 1932 atlas, making nearly 700 maps of American history come alive.
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Give me land, lots of land records! Here you can search more than 5 million federal land title records from 1788 on, plus survey plats and field notes, control document index records, and land status records.
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From Monte’s Planisphere of 1587 to interactive globes (of Earth, the Moon, and other planets), the 100,000-plus images here (literally) span the globe. The MapRank search tool enables simple searching of the collection by map location and coverage.
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Find the historical county for any of over 280,000 places in Great Britain. You can also research changing borders and even match postal codes to places.
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Search more than 1.6 million historical maps and images; more than half can be viewed using Historic Earth, a “geographic time machine.”
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Need a map of Venice in 1838? Belgium in 1777? You’ll find them and many more, in color and viewable side by side with modern maps or in 3D.
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Wildcards (use as many asterisks as you like) make it easy to search this database of every place name in the German Empire (1871 to 1918).
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Locate even your ancestors’ most obscure places using the Geographic Names Information System and the National Map, and view satellite, topographic and geologic maps.
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