In real life, I am a professional skip tracer. Basically, I hunt human beings who have run away from their debts. One of my favorite resources --- aside from public records, etc. --- is genealogy sites. They are a wealth of information about people and places . . . past and present.
Friday I ordered an ACE 250 from Kelleyco, and thought I would do a little prep work before it gets here. Well, knowing that a new map was of little use, as I know the topography of this county fairly well, I began looking for a map from the 1800's. Unfortunately the detail in those maps leave much to be desired. So I ran a search through Copernic's all in one search engine.I ran across something (which everyone else may already know about) which blew me away! I was able to get a detailed map of the county I live in . . . with every inhabited house, every one room school house, every church, and so on . . . from 1936! That's even better than what I was hoping for!
The site is called linkpendium.com (
http://www.linkpendium.com/genealogy/USA/). Just add your state's abbreviation after the "USA/" and you should be presented with all of the counties in the state. Here in Arkansas, it took me to a site called
http://www.arkansashighways.com where I can find numerous maps for each county from the year 1936.
In my case, I did not know that where I live used to be surrounded by many old school houses and churches. Large tracts of land that are now overgrown used to hold numerous houses. I was also surprised to know that many of the old mud roads now used only for hunting and logging, used to be part of the highway system here before Arkansas built the paved highways we now use. Hope this helps somebody plan their next hunt.
