Bartholomew's Atlas is a standard reference in England, useful for many
purposes besides genealogy. These atlases of England and Wales were printed for
many years, showing details of every street in the country. The maps were
printed at a scale of four miles to an inch. The 1898 edition includes town and
city street maps, railways, and a lot of printed statistics, along with a
placename index that lists 35,000 locations. Looking for an ancestor's location
after finding him or her in the census records? The 1898 Bartholomew's Atlas
includes many streets no longer in existence, either through development or
World War II bombing.
The 1898 Bartholomew's Atlas on CD-ROM is in Adobe Acrobat format. That's
good, as it can be used on Windows systems as well as Macintosh, Linux and
several varieties of UNIX. The CD-ROM set includes Adobe Acrobat for Windows,
for other operating systems can be downloaded at no charge from Adobe's Web
site.
This CD-ROM contains scanned images from the original printed books. These
images are very detailed, full-colour maps, scanned at 300 dots per inch. I had
some difficulty reading them on the screen when first displayed. However, the
Adobe software allows the user to zoom in and out as needed. When zooming in to
higher-power magnification, the words became a lot clearer. As I continued to
zoom in further, the smaller details became visible. At 1600% magnification, I
was able to clearly see every road, footpath and small hill. These maps are
really detailed! The first CD-ROM contains topographic maps of all England and
Wales. The second CD-ROM contains detailed street maps of all the larger cities.
The two CD-ROM disks contained scanned images of the original books published in
1898. The index is very detailed but is simply a scanned image of the original
printed index. As a result, there are no hyperlinks directly to the pages
referenced. Still, I found it easy to navigate around these CD-ROM disks. The
images were very detailed and easy to view. I did find it much easier to zoom in
on the on-screen version to see fine details. In fact, I could display a very
small neighborhood on the screen in a manner to see every street. The maps do
not display individual houses, however.
Printing also was easy, the same as in any modern Windows program. A black
and white printer will produce readable pictures, but you probably will prefer
to print these on a colour printer. I printed a Birmingham street map on a
Hewlett-Packard printer; and the street names were readable if I used a
magnifying glass.
The 1898 Bartholomew's Atlas is a valuable resource for anyone searching for
ancestors' homes of that period. You can easily locate their addresses and then
see the surroundings in which they lived. The original books are almost
impossible to find these days. If you can find the atlas for sale, it probably
is rather expensive. It also consumes a large space on your bookshelf.
Please note, this description is most of a review of the product written by
Dick Eastman, of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
Please read carefully: If the CDs are for use in a Society, Group or
Public Library you will need a library licence, this price is five times the
full retail price. You will then be issued with a library certificate for the
product. The publishers terms do not allow users to publish their products or
extracts on the internet. Also terms also exclude using this product to provide
a lookup service, or reselling it.
