Dutch Corner History Group

I have figured out how to overlay the land warrant surveys on an aerial photo. The hardest part was getting the photo to the same scale that I drew the plots. I think I have the plots along the mountain in place now. The gap around C-186-89 on the mountain near the Dibert's is gone. I may need a shoe horn to get the smaller plots squeezed in. Frank, it looks like your land is on Frank Zimmer's land (C-16-56/57. After taking a close look on Google Earth I must ask what is the circular arangement on the hill to the north of Frank's house?

Bill

Bill,

The circles on the hilltop are piles of lumber around an Elizabethan-style theater that I was building. Since the photo, several windstorms discouraged my efforts to build ANYTHING up there one the hilltop. The piles of lumber are still stored there. My theater is now in one of my barns, but I am thinking about setting it up elsewhere on my farm.

I am surprised that this land was Frank Zimmers. I must look at the map again. I thought Zimmers was on the southern side of the ridge that my house faces. I AM aware, however, of one or two potential house foundations that are slightly north of where I live.

Will you be able to post on this forum any parts of the map overlaid on a photo?

Frank

Depending on what my garden has in store for me I hope to still have some time this evening to work on the map overlay and see if I can get it on the forum.

Great!

Here is the map as it stands tonight. It still is not correct. Now that I got some detail in the aerial photo up in the area of Frank's place I can see I need to adjust the ratio between the areial photo and the warrant map overlay. The photo needs to be enlarged slightly. The red line is where I now think the northern edge of the Zimmer's land should be (C-16-56/57). That would put Frank's place on A-34-138 which was John Ickes. The stream that flows past Franks house I now believe was refered to as "Bowsers Run" on John Ickes' warrant survey. Also Dunnings Creek does not line up. It should also line up if I make the adjustment. The southern end of the map is properly lines up with the Raystown Branch as shown on those surveys. Also some of the present day fence lines should line with the Zimmer and surrounding plots. It also looks like some of the roads will follow some boundries of the land warrants once I fix the map. This makes sense for the roads to run along some of the boundries. The detail allowed by the file size allowed to be uploaded to the forum is not good enough to see how the lines line up with the fence lines and roads. The gaps around C-186-89 near Dibert Corner are now back. They have to be there or the rest of the map will not fit. Once I get the overlay correctly postioned on the photo then a higher resolution map could be uploaded to the site where the other map is located.

Bill

Bill, This is FANTASTIC!

I am ready to nominate you as historian of the year!

Frank

I think this is just about as accurate as I am going to get. It looks like the trick is to overlay my survey drawings on the aerial photos. There are enough fence lines that still exist that match the original land warrants. Now that I have an aerial photo sized to the same scale as the drawing the surveys can be accurately positioned using the visible fence lines. Since the quality of the aerial image is degraded to keep the file size small enough to post on this forum seeing the fence lines will be difficult. Pull up the aerial image from Google Earth and zoom in until you can see the detail of the fence lines. You will see the lines I am aligning the surveys to. Some of the surveys as you can see are a little off. Not bad considering the equipment they used back in those days to do the surveys. I will work my way south through Dutch Corner doing the same to overlay the surveys. Once I get all of the warrants I have to date in Dutch Corner overlaid on the aerial photo I will send higher resolution to Lora to be posted to the site. I’ll add the Series-Volume-Page numbers to the higher resolution map. Then I can continue to study and add to the new warrant surveys to the map.

Bill

WONDERFUL!

I can also use the aerial photo to tweek some of the plots that were not quite right when I drew them from the old survey.

Bill,

I think that we should use the occasion of the next meeting of the Dutch Corner History Group to launch your work i.e. announce it to the public. That meeting will be in September. We have always met on Sundays, but I don't believe that works for you. We could probably change the day of the meeting in order to have you there. Also, we could probably use Bedford High School's LGIA in order to use the computer technology they have there.

What do you think?

Frank