Fully indexed for every locality mentioned in the 1880 US Census, plus every 1887 US Post Office!
Maps and Index for the United States are on this CD, plus maps of Canada. Published by George F. Cram of Chicago in 1888, this atlas contains a USA placename index with over 58,000 entries, each pinpointed on its map with a mouse-click. Most of these towns no longer exist, having been renamed, deserted, or absorbed into neighboring metropolitan areas.
This was their 22nd Edition since the Civil War, and Cram's printers had become masters of multi-color cerographic printing Their maps were far superior to Rand-McNally, Tunison, and other rivals. We have scanned the maps are at 250 pixels-per-inch, so they'll make very attractive and legible prints.
Additional historic maps with a very informative timeline and 1888 maps of Canada (unindexed) are also on this CD. As with our Andree's Atlas CD's, our software allows the user to attach graphics and text files to any placename, and any search will give its concise county history, and longitudes and latitudes. The user may create their own database of descriptions and pictures of places of interest for easy access.
To view sample maps from the Cram's 1888 Atlas, click the button at left.

Our combined database contains nearly 120,000 US and Canadian place-names from the Cram's 1888 Atlas index, modern US and Canadian postal lists, including over 4000 US and Canadian counties, parishes, precincts or districts past and present with their succinct histories. Input a place-name, and it will be compared by improved Soundex against the full database to give a list of possible matches, with dates of foundations of counties, parent and successor counties, extant censuses, etc. Any place on the list can be located on its map instantly. This may save many hours and fees searching records in the wrong counties, etc. A superb resource for North American historical geography!

Input any GEDCOM and it will examine each and every event place and date to verify if town and county are possible and consistent with the date of the event. The event date and place are checked for correct spelling and notation and then compared to the database of 120,000 North American places and 4000 county histories. Each event's place-date record will be noted as either correct, or a memo describing possible errors will be fully given with suggestions for corrections.
The event is also checked against other vital events of all closely-related persons and flagged if improbable (for instance, married before age 16). Also included is a family relations check for the obvious (mother died before birth of child) and the less obvious (1st cousin marriages). About 50 such checks are performed on each individual in the GEDCOM. The output is a text file with corrections and suggestions where to seek records. Even professional genealogists will be amazed at the hidden and overlooked errors this tool will find!

Send us a GEDCOM for a FREE trial report!
The Inspector can handle very large files, but your trial GEDCOM should be under 40KB in size. Just one GEDCOM at a a time please! If you have the option (with the latest FTM for example) select the destination software to be PAF, which is correctly formatted for GED 2.1 to 5.5 Standards. Please attach your GEDCOM file to an e-mail message addressed to geneabase@sbcglobal.net and we will send your report within a few days.

Browse through the multi-page Manual/Help File to see what Cram's 1888 Atlas can do.

Besides being a quaint and vivid reminder of our nation's past, the Cram's indexed atlas lists almost 60,000 placenames from the 1880's. It describes a toponymy which in many areas has been almost fully effaced and remade over the last 120 years. Take, for instance, the State of Alabama. The Cram's index of 1,604 Alabama place-names combined with 851 from the modern postal list gives a total of 2,455 names. Only 354 names from the Cram's list can be found on the modern list, and about 10% of these have variant spellings. This leaves 1,250 places unmatched, and therefore over three-quarters of the place-names from 1880's Alabama have since lapsed into obscurity and can be found only by using this atlas. Another 21 places were near a county line and are now listed in the neighboring county. And very significantly, 45 places from 1888 (3% of the total) can no longer be found on a modern map in their original locations, but new towns in other distant locations around the State now have their names. If you had been researching a family event for the older locality, you may well have been looking in entirely the wrong town and county. Considering these facts, any serious family historian will want this antique indexed atlas as a necessary supplement to a good modern atlas for all US family research.

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Comments and questions welcome at geneabase@sbcglobal.net