07 February 2009

David Rumsey Map Collection

If you have never used the David Rumsey Map Collection, you are missing a wonderful resource. I have used maps from many states and have been well rewarded in my searches. The site has almost 20,000 digitized maps.

Rumsey is a retired San Francisco real estate developer. That in itself puts him high in my esteem -- I love San Francisco. Now, he has turned over his collection of 150,000 maps to the Stanford University Libraries' Special Collections in Palo Alto, California. [It will] "help create one of the premier cartographic collections of American history in the United States," said Julie Sweetkind-Singer, head librarian of the Branner Earth Sciences Library and Map Collections.

The maps are not all flat or folded, some are in books. Just tonight I was looking at the images from an 1832 Atlas of Scotland. My Stuarts, Grants, Edwards, and Allardyce families were in the counties of Aberdeen and Forfar [Angus].

Read more about his donation in the Stanford Report.

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