Research Tip

[rickv14623]

This may already be a well known one but, you know you can set alerts in Google for search terms about new items. Sidewalk replacements, construction, old house tear-downs, heck even metal detecting. This can keep you in the loop not just in your town but in the area.

My 2 cents, maybe someone will find it useful

HH

Rick

 

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[hunter_46356]

I'm interested but can't seem to figure it out. Is this in regular Google Search or Google Chrome?

No worry did some google-ing and figured it out, neat concept and very well could work. Just not sure I want to be anymore connected to this thing than I already am. Have to ponder this one.

 

[vpnavy]

If ya interesting jump over to Monitor the Web for interesting new content...

 

[Tom_in_CA]

Go to google NEWS. Once there, do key word searches with combinations of words like "historic" and "demolish" (so that both words have to appear in the text). Or "streetscape" and "sidewalks" (so you can know when downtown districts might be getting their sidewalks torn out), or "park" and "renovation" (so you can know when they might be dozing up an old park to make way for artificial turf, or in some way tearing into old turf for new basketball courts of something.)

And once you do this, you will of course get meaningless hits with nothing to do with what you wanted. Example: "49'rs demolish Giants in historic game". So you'll have to learn to be fast with the delete button scanning for the type stories you wanted

Once you done variations of key words, you'll get hundreds of hits from all over the world, going back several weeks. Obviously more than you can sleuth through, and obviously from places you can never get to. So NEXT what you do is go to the bottom of the page, and select "advanced search". Once there, select that you only want hits from newspapers in your state. Then select that you want the "alerts" from such hits to be sent to your email. At that point, you might only get a few hits a day. A lot of them will be meaningless random word coincidences, that you'll learn to quickly delete upon reading headlines. But sometimes, a gem will come up, for a city near you, that you'd have never have been driving through to chance on some form of old-town demolition, or park scrape, etc...

I was doing such a thing back in 2005/2006, and came across an item from a newspaper in SF, talking about how one of the parks was going to be getting artificial turf installed. I pulled out a map, and could see that it was in a neighborhood dating to the 1880s. A rather blighted neighborhood that, buried in residential off-streets that ..... odds are ..... if you didn't know, you'd have never have happened to chance by it. Because of the article, a few friends and I kept a close eye on the starting date. Then once the tractors arrived, and started peeling off the grass, it was Christmas-come-early for us each day after 5pm, for a week or two Here was the totals, that were primarily from only 6 hunters:

266 silver, of which 14 were seateds, 57 were barbers, 99 mercs, 1 silver dollar, etc....
Over 1000 wheaties
35 Indian Cents
34 buffalo nickels
62 V nickels,
24 trade tokens (not inc. junk tokens)

 

[hunter_46356]

Not trying to steal the thread but since this is basically about research I have a question. Looking at the many various communities within driving distance of me there are many local parks. Obviously some old and some new. Without actually driving around and looking at them is there any way you can find the approx. age of the park through other sources. I've checked town and city web sites and park dept. info. and county maps and info. but so far no luck.

 

[Tom_in_CA]

Not trying to steal the thread but since this is basically about research I have a question. Looking at the many various communities within driving distance of me there are many local parks. Obviously some old and some new. Without actually driving around and looking at them is there any way you can find the approx. age of the park through other sources. I've checked town and city web sites and park dept. info. and county maps and info. but so far no luck.

Hunter, here's a few ways to find out:

You can do a google man-on-the-street view, and look at the houses that surround the park. Assuming you are good at dating housing styles, then it's safe to assume the park is about the same age (as that would be the era the city grew out to that point). However, it's possible that parks used to be in the country, and city limits eventually expanded out to the point of the park. But at a minimum, you could assume the park must be *at least* as old as the surrounding houses.

And if you really have no idea of house-dating, you can find out house ages by going to zillow or realtor.com, and ..... by clicking on random houses in the neighborhood, some of those sites give the date of const. of the houses.

You can also look at old maps of your area. So if, for example, you see the park on a 1910 map, then you can be sure that it's *at least* that old, and so forth.

 

[jayg]

great tips on the house -park dating

 

[JC Allen]

I'll give Tom's comment a big +1!! Using historical topographic and fire insurance maps is a great way to dig up new, er, old spots to look! And once you overlay them into Google Earth, you get to see exactly where parks, houses, schools, and other interesting spots were.

Sadly a quick glance for "NW Indiana" maps was pretty lacking, though your local library or historical society may be able to help!

Here is snip from a fire insurance map from Angola, Indiana in 1886...if you can track down something for your area, they come in handy.

 

[hunter_46356]

This is a great site for free Indiana historical maps I've used many times, if your lucky enough the community your researching is included. There are links to other states through other universities but I have not investigated those sites.
Union List of Sanborn Maps (A-C)

 

[rickv14623]

Love it when the "crowd" puts in some great information like these responses. Thanks all y'all

 

[jayg]

does anyone know any sites on historical maps of warren Michigan? Not so much the beginning of warren, but maps like san born maps from 1940's

 

[RobRieman]

Hi jayg, go to www.historicaerials.com. Most of the US is mapped aerial and includes topo's. You can pick two dates and compare now and then.

 

[jayg]

thx,I'll check it out &let you know