Here’s how to remove damage from photos, such as those commonly found on Polaroid Land pictures. It’s a simple digital photo restoration technique you can use to improve your old family photos. See how Lisa Louise Cooke cleaned up a precious family photo as a surprise for an guest she interviewed—and his touching response.
Last month, I asked esteemed film historian Sam Gill to send me some photos of himself that I could include on the “show notes” page for Genealogy Gems Podcast episode #215.The episode features our conversation on silent films, and the glimpse of early 20th century life that they provide.
One of the images he shared captures him (when he was in high school) and his mom. Sam told me that it was taken at the time when he started helping her with their family’s genealogy.
“I seem to have only one photograph of my mother and me at that time, which was what they called a Polaroid Land Pictures photo,” he continued. “In the days before selfies and digital cameras, this was a way to have a photo miraculously developed in sixty seconds. That was considered a miracle of photography at the time.
“Although these photos tended to leave streak marks and other blemishes, it’s all I got! I am hoping you might get a kick out of seeing this young kid and his intelligent, forever-curious and talented mother, Florence Louise Jones Gill (aka Mom).”
After learning how much the memories behind that photo meant to Sam, I took the liberty of doing some quick touch up work on it. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly cleaner:
A treasured old photo of Sam and his mom.
You can try the same techniques I used to remove damaged areas from photos you’ve digitized. It’s easy and free! So, follow along with me, and then keep reading for Sam’s response to receiving the cleaned-up photo.
How to remove damage from photos
(Update) In the past I have downloaded and used the free Adobe PhotoShop Fix app. However, the Adobe Photoshop Express app has now taken its place. You can download it onto your phone or other mobile device for free from the App Store or Google Play. You will find the Retouch feature as a Premium feature.
Then follow these steps:
1. Add a Copy of the Digital Image
Open the app and tap the Plus sign to add your image. Don’t work with the original photo file. I save mine in Dropbox, but you can also pull your image copies from your phone, Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Facebook or Google Photos.
Tap the plus sign and select the location of your photo.
2. Tap Healing in the Menu
This will get you to the tools you will need to do the restoration.
3. Start with Minor Repairs
Start with the easy stuff (don’t go for the face right away,thought it’s tempting). Work on clothing and the backdrop first so you can get a feel for the repair work and refine your retouching movements.
4. Apply the Spot Heal Tool
Use Spot Heal first and see if it takes care of the problem area. Don’w worry about making mistakes. You can always tap the Undo at the top of the screen if you’re not happy with the results.
5. Apply Clone Stamp
Use the Clone Stamp tool to select an area on the existing photo that you want to duplicate to cover up a damaged area. For example you can select an unblemished area of the backdrop, duplicate it, and then “paste” it over a blemished area of the backdrop. Keep in mind that even in a single color backdrop, there can be shading, so move the clone stamp around to replicate it accurately.
Tap Clone Stamp in the menu, and use the tools on the left to adjust.
You can adjust the size of the clone stamp selection tool by tapping “Size” in the pop out menu on the left. Selecting “hardness” will give you the ability to cone with a sharp edge or a more feathered edge which is a bit more forgiving when covering another area.
6. Zoom for Greater Detail
Zoom in for better accuracy. To do this, put two fingers together and then them spread apart to enlarge the area.
While zooming in can give you greater control, if you get too close you may start seeing individual pixels (depending on the size and resolution of the original photo) and those can be much trickier to change accurately. Zoom back out often to “stand back” and inspect your work!
7. Adjust as Needed
If you’re going to zoom in, take the time to adjust the size of the tool you are using, whether it’s Spot Heal or Clone Stamp. You can adjust the size of the circle and the “hardness” by tapping the tab on the left side of the screen.
When you’ve completed your initial re
8. Saving
Be sure to save to your work along the way. That way you can always go back to a previous version if you get a little too overzealous. I like to save the image to my device’s Photos, but the app offers a variety of saving locations.
9. Apply Smoothing
In the main menu, use the Smooth tool to refine your work. Start by tapping Face. Chances are you’ll like the effect as it smooths the skin tone. And again, you can always undo if you don’t.
Then tap to spot-smooth areas, particularly backdrops. Beware of over-smoothing – it won’t look natural.
10. Make Final Adjustments
After you complete the repair work, play with other options to improve the image quality. In the main menu tap Adjust. Play with Contrast first, then move on to testing Warmth, Saturation, Shadows and Highlights.
When you’re done, save the finished image one last time to your device’s Photos.
Take Mobile Photo Restoration a Step Further
When I work on improving and restoring my old photos, I often do so in more than one app. It’s rare to find an app that does everything you want, and each has it’s special strengths. Adobe has several other excellent apps, and PhotoShop Mix is one I use quite often after I complete my initial restoration in Adobe PhotoShop Fix.
Import the restored image into the freeAdobe Photoshop Mix app. Here you’ll find even more tools for refining the image. Tap Adjust in the main menu. Experiment with these tools because you can always Undo!:
Auto Fix – I avoid this one!
Temperature
Exposure
Contrast
Highlights
Shadows
Clarity – definitely give this a whirl
Saturation
I was delighted how quickly I was able to significantly improve the photo. Sam and his mom’s faces just radiate happiness.
I sent it off and heard back from him almost immediately:
“I can’t tell you how much it means to me to see this extraordinary repair and restoration work you accomplished on that tiny Polaroid Land Picture of my mother and myself! This picture was taken at the exact same time I began to help my mother with her genealogical work.”
He then shared the story about that first research project with her. The two of them wanted to identify the relative who had rendered some beautiful old paintings hanging in his grandparents’ house. The trail led mother and teenage son to London, Ontario, Canada. As a budding genealogist, Sam was certainly thinking ahead!
“I convinced my mother to let me take along a tape recorder, as I was very interested in sound recordings, and so we recorded my mother’s interviews with family members still in London and related to the same…family.”
Sam and his mother identified the artistic ancestor who did those paintings: John Ashton. Their research culminated in a “delightful little family history, called The Descendants of John Ashton, of London, Ontario, Canada, and his Son-in-Law, John Ames Arnold, of Greencastle, Indiana (Lyons, Ks.: Lyons Publishing Co., 1964) compiled by my mother, Florence Jones Gill.”
Sam proudly mentions that her book was favorably reviewed. A quick check ofGoogle Booksreveals that there was indeed quite a bit of “buzz” when she published her book! It was referenced in several genealogical publications. Here are the search results in Google Books:
Sam wrapped up his reply with a little life lesson that he learned from his mom, that we can all take to heart.
“You might get a kick out of this,” Sam wrote, “but the only mistake that my mother ever found after the book was published, was the date of her marriage to my father! It should have been 1935, not 1934. One never to take herself TOO seriously, she had quite a laugh over that one.
It was fun helping my mother. Also, as I look back over my life, I must say that I have never known a more “can-do” person than my mother. If something came up that needed attention–no matter what it was–my mother’s usual response was , “WELL, WE’VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT !!!”
So my dear Gems, next time we see our family’s history hidden behind damage in an old photo, let us hear Mrs. Gill’s words in our ears “WE’VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT!!!”
My book Mobile Genealogy is chock full of more innovative ideas for using your smartphone and tablet for family history. It’s available here in the Genealogy Gems store.
In this free video, you’ll discover three important steps you can take right now to capture and preserve your family traditions for generations to come from my wonderful friend and colleague Gena Philibert-Ortega. Happy Thanksgiving!
Show Notes: Three steps to preserve your Thanksgiving traditions
Thanksgiving, in my opinion, is a family history holiday. It’s one where families gather, where we bring out family heirlooms, and where we talk where we share memories. So, it’s a good time to think about your Thanksgiving traditions, write them down, preserve them, and share them. So, let’s talk a little bit about how to do that.
#1 Ask
I have my memories of Thanksgiving from when I was a kid, when I was a young adult, and then later when I was married, and had small children versus older children. However, my kids have their own memories, and grandparents have their memories too. So, now’s the time to ask about those and write them down. Those memories might have to do with food, material culture, which I’ll define in just a second, or they may have to do with events.
Food:
What are the recipes that you use at Thanksgiving?
How does Thanksgiving food change as you grow older? Or as the roles switch?
Who cooks, and how has that changed over time?
Who’s there with you enjoying the meal and the holiday?
These are things that you can interview family members or yourself and write down.
Material Culture and Thanksgiving:
Material culture simply means stuff. So what stuff is used to put on Thanksgiving? At my house, that means the special tablecloth and the China both mine and my grandmother’s.
What do you bring out to serve Thanksgiving? It might be special dinnerware, or special serving pieces. It might be aprons to wear, or special linens.
What kinds of things are on the little kids table?
What is brought out and talked about and how has that changed over the years?
What do you use for special occasions like Thanksgiving? Do you go out to eat?
What events are associated with Thanksgiving for your family? Some families like to play a little flag football, some families watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.
Whatever it is for your family, write that down, talk about it, explain what it is. Remember, we’re preserving memories that our children and grandchildren will read in the future. They may not understand what that event is. So, make sure you describe it.
#2 Document
What are some of the ways you can document your traditions? Well, you can do it with photographs. You can share photos from the past Thanksgiving. Have everybody bring the photos they have. You can even create a Thanksgiving album for your family. You can gather photos, photos from recent Thanksgivings, and even take photos of this Thanksgiving. You can ask family members to write their memories. You could also interview family members and create a video.
Paper or computer programs:
For example, maybe you could put together recipe cards and hand them out at Thanksgiving. Have everybody write their favorite recipes and then duplicate them and pass them out.
Family cookbook:
There are certainly many different programs online that you can use to create one yourself or that you can send to a specialized cookbook publisher.
Tablecloth:
Get a white tablecloth and bring out waterproof markers and ask family members to write their name. Write the date write events that have happened in the year. Write down memories if they want for little kids have them trace their hands, have them sign their name the best they can write their ages down. You can use that year after year, or you can preserve it for one specific year.
#3 Share
A lot of us have the habit of gathering information and then not really sharing it. But sharing it is what makes sure that things are preserved and ensures that it’s preserved that it goes down the generations. And it’s a good idea to have copies in case some are lost. Sharing is important. So how do we do that?
Physically:
We can do that by creating physical items like:
photo albums
flash drives (create duplicate flash drives and hand them out to the family.)
post things on social media, like a family Facebook page, or maybe a Pinterest board, or even your online family tree on Ancestry or FamilySearch
the cloud – where family members can download what they need when they need it. And you can continue to add family members over the years. And that might be done in a cloud program like Dropbox or Google Drive.
Preserve Your Thanksgiving Traditions Today
There are all kinds of ways that you can share Thanksgiving traditions and memories with other family members. Do what’s best for you what’s easiest for you, and what gets the information out there sooner rather than later. Thanksgiving is a special time and it’s something that we may all look forward to maybe because of the food or the family. I hope that you take some time this Thanksgiving to preserve your family memories. Happy Thanksgiving!
About My Special Guest Presenter: Gena Philibert-Ortega
Gena Philibert-Ortega is an author, researcher, and instructor whose focus is genealogy, social and women’s history. She holds a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies (Psychology and Women’s Studies) & a Master’s degree in Religion. Her published works include 3 books, numerous articles published in magazines and online, & Tracing Female Ancestors (Moorshead Publishing). She is the editor of the Utah Genealogical Association’s magazine, Crossroads. Her writings can also be found on the GenealogyBank blog. She has presented to diverse groups including the National Genealogical Society Conference, Alberta Genealogical Society Conference, Geo-Literary Society, & the Legacy Family Tree Webinar series. Her research projects include Sowerby’s British Mineralogy: Its Influence on Martha Proby and Others in the Scientific Community during the 19th Century for the Gemological Institute of America, as well as genealogical research for the first season of PBS’s Genealogy Roadshow & the Travel Channel’s Follow Your Past. Her current research includes women’s repatriation and citizenship in the 20th century, foodways and community in fundraising cookbooks, & women’s material culture.
AUDIO PODCAST SHOW NOTES: In episode #290 of the Genealogy Gems podcast, Lisa Louise Cooke covers 5 of the top gems that came out of 2024. Use these to boost your family history now!
Watch the Video
Listen to the Podcast Episode featuring 5 Genealogy Gems
Get all the basic details on LiveMemory on the show notes page for Genealogy Gems Podcast episode #289.
Since the launch MyHeritage has added a set of 10 custom animation options. Now you can choose the action and resulting emotion for more fun. You can choose from emotional gestures such as hugging. laughing, kissing, dancing, and singing. You can also go more playful with zero gravity, underwater, rain, balloons, and even add a T-Rex to the scene!
With the newest update your videos will now be stored in your MyHeritage account. This makes them easily available through the app gallery. Photos with a LiveMemory™ have a play icon on the bottom. Tap the photo, then tap “LiveMemory” to play your video. You can also download the video to your device.
It’s now easy to share your videos with friends and family directly from the app to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Bluesky, WhatsApp, and other social media. Tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen, then select the social media platform of your choice.
Tips from MyHeritage for Best Results:
Make sure you have the latest updated version of the MyHeritage mobile app installed.
MyHeritage recommends that you upload “an iconic family photo with interesting content. If you upload an ordinary selfie or a photo showing two people standing, there is no scene to speak of and the output video may look boring, unless you use one of the custom animations.
The results can vary depending on the resolution of the original photo and the angle of a person’s face. If you aren’t satisfied with the results, try uploading higher-resolution photos or photos with larger, more visible faces.”
Ancestry added loads of new records in 2024. The best way to quickly find and review them is in the Card Catalog: 1. Go to https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/catalog/ 2. From the Sort by drop-down menu select Date Added 3. Records will be listed starting with the most recently added. They will be marked New.
#3 FamilySearch new records updates
FamilySearch also added millions of new records. Most were added to existing collections, expanding them even further. FamilySearch also used AI to generate indexes for many of their existing collections making them much more usable. This all means it’s worth revisiting collections where you came up empty in the past. If you’re looking for free international records, FamilySearch is hard to beat! It includes,
Chronicling America is a huge collection of free digitized old newspapers from the United States. However, in the past it did not include all of the newspapers available through the Library of Congress website. Now all digitized newspapers have come under one search umbrella with the new Chronicling America website.
Chronicling America is in the process of transitioning from the legacy Chronicling America interface to a new Chronicling America interface and back-end search infrastructure. Read more about it.
Search the 4,000+ newspaper title with the Advanced Search at Chronicling America.
Use the interactive map at Chronicling America to search for family history in old newspapers.
#5 AI Increased Use in Genealogy
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here and will be with us in 2025 and many years to come. AI has been incorporated into genealogy websites for quite some time. However, in 2024 we saw a real uptick in genealogists using stand alone AI sites like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others to assist with their research.
If you’re going to start using these AI sites, keep a couple of key things in mind.
1) It’s not a person. No matter how realistic it sounds, or how many times it refers to itself as “I”, it’s not a real person. This is important to remember as you’re interacting with it. When AI talks to you like it’s a person, and you work with it for a period of time, you can start to have the impression or the feeling that it knows what it’s talking about. It can come across as authoritative. You can get the impression that it understood what you asked for, and that’s just not the case. It’s a language tool, and it’s trying to put together what it thinks makes sense based on what it has already “learned”.
This means you must be in the driver’s seat and stay in the driver’s seat. Continually analyze what you’re getting from AI. Think about what it is “saying: Go check it out and verify the information and get more evidence to back it up.
2) It’s not a stand-alone search engine. At this point AI isn’t ready to be used as a stand-alone search Q and A tool. However, it does have strengths we can use today for such activities as: • Translating typed text, • Summarizing large documents, • Reassembling information into desired formats, • Finding information buried within a document. • Quickly determining if particular items appear in a document.
It can do much of the legwork, thereby speeding up the research and writing process.
If I had to predict, I would say we’re going to see AI and search merge more and more. In fact, over at Google’s Gemini, we’re noticing that it sometimes provides users with a check this at Google button. For now though, be aware that Google’s search results are not fully represented in Gemini’s responses. Go search it separately on Google, and then review the results provided. Make sure you can actually find sources for yourself that verify everything that AI tells you.
Learn more about AI and Genealogy with Genealogy Gems:
Have you ever found an address for an ancestor but been disappointed that it is just a Route number and a town name? Have you wondered if it is possible to figure out where they actually lived? The good news is, it is! I’m going to show you how to take a rural “route” address from the early 20th century and find it on an old census enumeration district map.
(This article contains affiliate links for which we may be compensated. Thank you for supporting our free content.)
In a recent video I showed you how to find 1950 Census Enumeration District (ED) maps. These are super helpful and also free. In that video we used the address of an ancestor that we found by hunting through old letters and documents. But for many Americans in the early 20th century that address may have just been a route number and town.
That was the case for my viewer Lisa. She emailed me after she watched the video. She writes, “How can you find the E.D. number when you only have a Route number? My relatives lived in rural Arkansas.”
This is totally doable! Follow allow these steps of this case study and they will help you find the E.D. number and census enumeration district maps, and zero in on the location.
“Route 2” & Rural Delivery
A carrier route is basically the territory one letter carrier can cover on a daily basis. So, there could be a Route 1 or a Route 2 in thousands of places around the country. It just happens that your ancestor was on, say, Route 2 in a particular township area. Although it doesn’t tell us which house, it does dramatically narrow down the place because a daily route was the same and may not have been that large. Once we find that area we can then use other sources to help us try to get even more specific.
The first thing we need to do is gather some details. We need:
The ancestors’ names
The Route number address which includes the town
The county – which is something we can easily find online with a quick search
The year – in this case the address she has is from 1950.
So, here’s what Lisa sent me about her ancestors, the Blazers:
Names: Joseph Madison Blazer and Minnie Blazer
Route number: Route 2
Address: Frazier Pike
County: Pulaski
Joe and Minnie Blazer c1950 (Image courtesy of Lisa Egner.)
Step 2: Find the Family in the Census
Now we need to find the family in the census record closest to the date of the known address.
Since the 1950 census hasn’t been released yet because I’m recording this in Jan. of 2022, we can’t yet pull up their record. So, we’ll need to turn to the 1940 census. There’s a good chance that the family was in the same location since folks didn’t typically move around quite as much or as far as we do these days.
The 1940 census is available for free at many of the larger genealogy websites like FamilySearch and Ancestry.
Here’s the Blazer family in the 1940 census, and Lisa confirmed that she believes this is the same place.
On the census record we are looking for three very important things:
the township (Badgett Township)
the ED number (60-2B)
and any address written along the left margin. If you don’t see anything, check the pages before and after that page. (Frazier Pike)
Step 3: Search for the Township
Once you have the location or township, search for them in an online map. I prefer to use Google Earth, but I often also use Google Maps. It doesn’t hurt to check both.
In this case we have two locations to look for: Badgett Township and Frazier Pike. We’ll start with the actual address which was Frazier Pike, Arkansas. Google Earth tell us that it’s a road just southeast of Little Rock, AR. When you click the pin it also tells you the current zip code for the Frazier Pike area, so we’ll make note of that. I’m like to create a project folder (Blazer Address) in my Places panel and then save the location pin in it. I will add additional items to the folder as I find them.
Click the pin to see the zip code.
Next, I’ll search for the other location found in the 1940 census, Badgett Township. It doesn’t appear in either Google Earth or Google Maps. That’s probably because it’s been renamed or incorporated. Googling may be able to help so I googled: badgett township arkansas history.
This led me to a website that provided several helpful clues. It says that Badgett is “historical”, meaning that it’s the old name of the town which has since changed. It also provides us with the latitude and longitude of Badgett which we can use in Google Earth to confirm it’s location.
Go back to Google Earth and enter the coordinates (34°42’10” N 92°12’0″ W) in the search box and press ENTER on your keyboard.
The locations are very close.
And indeed, it’s very close to Frazier Pike. (image above)
I also like to look at the image results when googling. The website results are organized by the most relevant images. When I ran a search on Badgett, AR, and click Images on the results page, I see that the first one showed a map showing Frazier Pike. So, they are nearly one and the same.
Another search result was theHome Town Locator website. It says “the Township of Badgett (historical) is a cultural feature (civil) in Pulaski County. The primary coordinates for Township of Badgett (historical) places it within the AR 72206 ZIP Code delivery area.” This confirms that it is historical, the coordinates pin the same place on the map, and the current zip code is the same.
A quick Find on the page search (Alt + F) for Route 2 jumps me to a nice bit of history.
In the section discussing schoolhouses we get a description of the route: “…located in the main red-dirt road called Route 2 in Pulaski County. Route 2 is now known as Frazier Pike.”
Step 4: Find the ED Map for the Closest Census
Next, we turn our attention to the enumeration district or ED number we found on the 1940 census. As you’ll recall, 1940 is the closest available census record to the date of the address, and we found Lisa’s ancestors in that record in Badgett, AR which we now know is the Frazier Pike area in Pulaski county. On that record it says: Badgett Township. ED 60-2B.
We could google for the year of the census and the words enumeration district map. However, there’s a great free tool for finding them over at Steve Morse’s One-Step Tools website at stevemorse.org.
In the menu under U.S. Census select the Unified 1880-1950 Census ED Finder, select the year at the top of the page. In this case we will select 1940. Next, enter the state (Arkansas) and county (Pulaski). You can then select the city or town. However, in the case of rural addresses, don’t expect to find the town listed. If it offers you an “Other” option you can try and type the name of the town (Badgett) in the field provided. Don’t bother entering the route number (Route 2) because that’s not a street address, it’s a postal delivery address.
We could also run this same search on the 1950 census. Chances are you will see more ED numbers listed because the population was growing. Since an enumeration district had to be the size that one enumerator could cover in about a two week timeframe, they were often redivided as they decades went by.
Since we know from the 1940 census that township was in existence, we should receive a list of ED numbers as a result. In this case we got three: 60-2A, 60-2B. and 60-3.
Click the corresponding ED number.
Click the linked ED number that matches the one you found in the census record. In this case, the 1940 census record told us that the Blazer family was in ED 60-2B, so we click that link.
The next page lists each ED. Click the View link for the ED.
Click the View link.
The View link will take you to the exact page for that ED in the ED Descriptions from the National Archives T1224 microfilm from Record Group 29. This description helps even further define the area.
1940 Census ED Description
60-2 A and B says, “Badgett Township – That part north of section line beginning at the southwest corner of section 19, Township 1 North, Range 11 and extending due east to township line. Show separately College Station (unincorporated.)”
This is perfect because its’ giving us the township, range and section! We can use this information to plot it in Google Earth.
How to plot a land description in Google Earth with Earthpoint:
Enter the state, principal meridian (in this case there’s only one choice here thankfully), township, range and section numbers from the census description.
Click the Fly to on Google Earth button.
This may open automatically in Google Earth or you may be prompted to save the file to your computer. Do that and then click it to open. It is a KMZ file so it will automatically open in Google Earth.
And here are the results! The location is mapped out for you.
Census description mapped in Google Earth.
Notice I still have my placemark pins for the approximate location of Frazier Pike, and the center of Badgett Twp which we got using the latitude and longitude coordinates. Section 19 is outlined in purple, and the township is outlined in orange.
Since Frazier Pike is a road, turn on Roads in the Layers panel. Now we can see that Frazier Pike is running north and south and our pin is right on top of it.
Now we can use the census description to further zero in on the area. “Badgett Township – That part north of section line beginning at the southwest corner of section 19 Township 1 North, Range 11 and extending due east to township line. Show separately College Station (unincorporated.)”
Mark that in Google Earth using the Path tool. Click the Path button in the toolbar at the top oof Google Earth. Click on the southwest corner of section 19 (outlined in purple) and then go east and click the township line (in orange.) Give your path a title and click OK.
Click the Path button in the tool bar.
Next in the census description, on the same line as “B” it says “Show separately College Station (unincorporated.)” We can find College Park by searching for College Station, AR in the Google Earth search box.
Next, we want to follow Frazier Pike going north until we are above the section line that started in the southwest corner of Section 19. Use the Path tool again to mark it on the map.
Use the path tool to draw lines in Google Earth.
Get the Enumeration District Map
Now it’s time to head back to Steve Morse’s website and get the ED map for 1940. On the page you started your search, click the See ED Maps for… button.
Click the See ED Maps button.
On the next page select the state, county and city again and click the Get ED Map Images button.
Click the Get ED Map Images button.
This will take you to a list of all of the available maps. The first link will take you to the National Archives webpage where you can look through all the maps for the area you selected. You could also look through all the individual maps by clicking each of the links listed under “Direct links to jpegs on NARA server”. However, I don’t recommend that will take longer because they are extremely large image files. It’s easier to quickly look through them on the NARA website.
Click the Link to NARA viewer.
Click the link to the NARA viewer and look for the township name in the map thumbnail images. In this case I’m looking for Badgett. You can do this quickly by clicking each image and then drag the larger map in the viewer around with your mouse. I found Badgett Township in the second map.
Map images at NARA.
Download the full-sized map by selecting the thumbnail image and then clicking the download button (down arrow.) The full resolution map will load in your web browser. Right-click on it and Save Image As to save it to your computer.
Right-click on the map to save it to your computer.
It can help to create a map overlay in Google Earth using this map. (Learn how to do this in the newest edition of my book The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox.) I cropped the image to just include Badgett Twp.
In fact, you can overlay both the 1940 and 1950 ED maps. Click to select a map in the Places panel and then you can use the transparency slide to fade it to reveal changes.
Select the map and use the opacity slider in Google Earth.
Step 5: Follow the Census
The census can provide even more clues about where in an enumeration district an address was located. Using the census record and the census description of the enumeration district, it can help to highlight the area of the map. In this case, ED 60-2 is “that part north of section line” which I marked with a red path line. The Blazers address was Frazier Pike (which I marked with a green line), so this eliminated the northern area and the Fourche Dam Pike road. To make sure that I could eliminate that area, I verified in the 1940 census that Fourche Dam Pike was enumerated separately by running a keyword search of the Pulaski County census records at Ancestry. And yes, indeed folks living along Fourche Dam Pike were enumerated separately and the road was written along the margin just as Frazier Pike was. This gives me a lot of confidence that I’m identifying the right area.
The route highlighted on the census ED map.
As you can see, there are little black squares and other markings on the map. To find out what each of those means we can turn back to the National Archives and download the page from this map collection that includes the map key.
The black squares are “Farm Units”. A farm unit square is not one family , it is the entire farm, including the owner and other families who may live and work on the farm. We also see businesses, churches, the town hall, school houses and more. We may not be able to find the exact home, but it’s possible to get very close. To do that, we need to head back to the census records themselves.
On Ancestry.com , the Blazers appear on Image 27. The filmstrip makes it easy to quickly scan through the images and browse them.
In this case, there are about 33 images or pages in ED 60-2B. The enumerator would start at one end of Frazier Pike and then make her way to the other. The enumerator wrote “College Station Pike” on pages 1 and 2. That isn’t a road today, and I couldn’t find any references to with a quick search. However, all of the other pages say, “Frazier Pike”. My guess would be that the census taker started on the west side – the hub of College Pike – and made her way east. Census enumerators visited homes and farms in a logical path, although they may have criss-crossed back and forth across the road. They listed the order in which they visited on the census form itself. In cities we might also see house numbers listed, but that’s not the case in a rural area. However, you may see pencil dots with visitation numbers written on the ED map. They were instructed to do this in rural areas in the census enumerator instructions in 1940. Unfortunately, the person enumerating 60-2B did not.
We could also look at the types of businesses and buildings shown on the map, and then look through the census records at occupations. We see a “factory/industrial” building to the east so we would look for people working in that environment in the census and see where they are living. We see a denser population in College Station along with a schoolhouse and two churches, so it would be worth looking through the census pages to see where the school teacher and pastors are listed. Folks may not have lived on the premises, but it would make sense they lived near their work.
Wedding photo Joseph Madison Blazer Minnie Mae Peters (courtesy of Lisa Egner)
And finally, we want to look for renters and owners. If a family rented, a capital “R” was entered on the census. Those who owned their property were listed with a capital “O”. Since the black squares are “Farm Units” we wouldn’t expect to see a square on the map for every house. If our hypothesis is that the enumerator started on the west side, we could count the number of owned dwellings listed in the census until we get to the family living in question. Then we would count them on the map, going east. Again, it’s not exact, but it’s a whole lot more than what we knew about the address Route 2 Frazier Pike when we started!
