After spending yesterday evening with a printout of a badly grabbed screen shot from the Griffiths Valuations website, a black mapping pen and much cursing at small faded print, I finally managed to cobble together a simple map of some adjoining townlands on the Carlow, Wicklow and Wexford border. I've been doing some family reconstruction with the St Fiaac's parish registers to try to work out the different branches of one surname and have hunted high and low online to find a simple townland map to help me understand the geography of the parish. Could I find one?! Wouldn't it be great if there were an Irish equivalent of Phillimore's Atlas? Is there something out there on the ether or even in print that I'm ignorant of? I'd gladly hand over good money to avoid another Blue Peter effort like last night!
On that note, have you noticed how geography always seems to be just another "fill-in-the-box" when you're searching online? Wouldn't it be a bit more revolutionary to put it first in a much more intuitive way as in being able to zoom in on a map of where you know your ancestors lived and have churches, workhouses, schools, workplaces etc. highlighted with links to either online indexes or archive addresses where original records are stored? Think about how powerful it would be to see results plotted on a map instead of returned in a list. The technology is there, just see Google Maps for all the businesses sponsored around your home, but of course there would need to be more work done to connect up all the data. I also suspect that the thorny issue of map copyright is another thing that would sadly probably plague this idea. What do you think?
On that note, have you noticed how geography always seems to be just another "fill-in-the-box" when you're searching online? Wouldn't it be a bit more revolutionary to put it first in a much more intuitive way as in being able to zoom in on a map of where you know your ancestors lived and have churches, workhouses, schools, workplaces etc. highlighted with links to either online indexes or archive addresses where original records are stored? Think about how powerful it would be to see results plotted on a map instead of returned in a list. The technology is there, just see Google Maps for all the businesses sponsored around your home, but of course there would need to be more work done to connect up all the data. I also suspect that the thorny issue of map copyright is another thing that would sadly probably plague this idea. What do you think?