Many genealogists have never heard of the Sanborn Maps. These maps of cities and towns can be a great genealogy resource. Founded in 1867 by D. A. Sanborn, the Sanborn Map Company was the primary American publisher of fire insurance maps for nearly 100 years. Their maps were designed to help insurance companies estimate the potential risk for urban structures. These maps are gradually becoming available online.

The maps include information such as the outline of each building, the size, shape and construction materials, heights, and function of structures, location of windows and doors. The maps also give street names, street and sidewalk widths, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers. They often give textual information on construction details (for example, steel beams or reinforced walls) on the plans and indicate different building materials with shading. Extensive information on building ranges from symbols for generic terms, such as stable, garage, and warehouse, to names of owners of factories and details on what was manufactured in them. In the case of large factories or commercial buildings, the maps even record individual rooms and their purposes. Other features shown include pipelines, railroads, wells, dumps, and heavy machinery.

In most cases, these maps do not list the owners’ names. However, if you have already found your ancestor’s address in a city directory or elsewhere, you can now look at a map of his or her property by accessing the Sanborn Maps.

The Sanborn Map Company kept updating their maps every few years. In some cases, seven or eight different editions of the maps are available, showing both urban growth and even a limited amount of migration trend information. Sanborn maps are valuable historical tools for urban specialists, social historians, architects, geographers, genealogists, local historians, planners, environmentalists, and anyone who wants to learn about the history, growth, and development of American cities, towns, and neighborhoods.

The Sanborn Map Company eventually was purchased by other companies and is now owned by Environmental Data Resources, Inc. You can still purchase copies of the maps directly from Environmental Data Resources at 1-800-352-0050 or at www.edrnet.com/. However, Environmental Data Resources’ Web site only contains order forms, it does not contain images of the original maps.

A new Web site recently appeared, called Digital Sanborn Maps. It was created from Bell & Howell Information and Learning's microfilm collection of 660,000 Sanborn Maps, which were filmed from the Library of Congress collection. The Library's Sanborn collection includes all maps submitted to the Library through copyright deposit and a set of maps transferred to the Library from the Bureau of the Census. Maps from the Bureau of the Census include corrections issued by the Sanborn Company that were pasted over the original map sheet. These maps are now being added to the commercial Web site in a project that should be completed by the end of August.

This week I had a chance to try out the new Digital Sanborn Maps site and found that it is a great online resource. Remember that it is a commercial site. That is, you must pay to use it.

Digital Sanborn Maps will include maps for all fifty states plus the District of Columbia. Keep in mind that not all states are online at this time, however. The digitization of all the Sanborn Fire Maps should be completed by the end of August. The Web site lists states in alphabetical order on a drop-down menu. For instance, I selected Utah, and then a new menu appeared, asking me to select a city or town. I selected Provo, and then a third pull-down menu appeared, asking which map I wanted to look at. The choices were February 1888, August 1890, August 1900, March 1908, February 1925 and February 1925-April 1950. The months and years will vary from city to city, depending upon the dates that cartographers from the Sanborn Map Company visited the area.

Continuing with my search, I selected February 1888. Four "thumbnail" size maps appeared, each showing different areas of Provo. Each one was much too small to read. I clicked on one at random, and a larger map appeared, although still very difficult to read. However, it had options to display larger and more detailed images. I kept clicking and clicking. Every time I did so the map "zoomed in" and a more detailed image appeared, always centered on the point that I had just clicked. Soon I was looking at a very detailed map of 7^th/Center Street, lined with many merchants. I noticed the following listings: Clothing Store, 1^st Telephone Exchange (keep in mind that this wasn’t long after Alexander Graham Bell’s invention), a dress shop, a tailor shop, a variety store (with an ash pit out back), a dentist, and more.

Moving to side streets, I found many dwellings, barns and coal sheds, hay sheds, and water wells listed. I guess a fire insurance company was concerned about flammables, such as coal and hay, as well as the location of water wells. I saw a few names of buildings, such as the Excelsior Livery and the Proctor Academy. Of the maps of Provo that I looked at, only a few had the merchant’s name, and none of the dwellings listed the names of the owners.

I then switched to a 1948 map of Alameda, California. This later map showed quite a contrast: instead of the livery stables and coal bins of 1888 Provo, I was looking at a California city in the midst of creating an urban sprawl. The streets were no longer laid out in a grid fashion; residential neighborhoods often had curving or even oval streets. Alameda also had numerous housing projects. Still, the information displayed was similar: each building was labeled as to its purpose with a few showing company names.

The maps are displayed in any regular Internet browser. The maps have been tested with both Internet Explorer and with Netscape. It should also work well in America Online and other browsers that are based upon Internet Explorer. There is no need for any other image-viewing program. If you wish to download a PDF version of your selected map sheet, simply click on the Download Map button and follow the menus. A PDF map will be displayed, and you can save that to your hard drive and print it later on your local printer. In order to view and print PDF maps, you will need to use Adobe Acrobat. This is a free program available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several versions of UNIX at: www.adobe.com.

Keep in mind that some of these maps are large and detailed. While they are always in black-and-white, many of the maps contain large images and may take a while to display if you are using a dial-up modem to access the Internet. I used a cable modem during my testing and found that most maps displayed within two or three seconds. A few of the largest ones required ten seconds. I suspect you will need to multiply those numbers by five or ten if you are using a dial-up connection.

You are legally able to use these maps for your own personal use, such as viewing them for personal genealogy research. However, Bell & Howell Information and Learning's agreements with Environmental Data Resources, Inc. (EDR), the owners of the Sanborn Maps, gives limited rights which do not include reproduction of images outside of Digital Sanborn Maps. Accordingly, you must obtain permission from both Bell & Howell and EDR before you may use these images in books or in magazine articles.

Access to the Digital Sanborn Maps is on a subscription basis. In fact, access is quite expensive, and I suspect that only a very few private individuals will ever obtain their own subscriptions. The Digital Sanborn Maps are also just one of many research tools available at the site. Most of the subscribers to Bell & Howell Information and Learning's online Web site are libraries and research institutions. Perhaps a few well-funded genealogy societies will obtain access to these maps, but I suspect that most researchers will obtain access at a large city library or at a university library. The Web site does not give pricing information. Instead, you can send an e-mail asking for a price quote to match the services that your organization needs to access.

While you cannot access the maps without a subscription, you can obtain information about the Digital Sanborn Maps and also an e-mail address for pricing information at: sanborn.umi.com.