----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Carolyn
Look in your library for Kenneth C. Martis's _Historical Atlas of United
States Congressional Districts, 1789-1983. I don't know that any of the
maps have been digitized, but that is the basic resource.
If you are trying to match towns to counties, try our atlas. The series we
are producing at the Newberry -- The Atlas of Historical County Boundaries
-- will take about 40 volumes to cover the whole country. To date we have
published 14 volumes covering 19 states and the District of Columbia.
(Scribner's is the publisher.) Maps of individual counties (one for each
different configuration) are at a scale of about 8 miles per inch, a much
larger scale than conventional road maps. For each state there is a
small-scale outline map (at a scale somewhat larger than Martis's) of the
state's county network at every census -- colonial/territorial and state,
as well as federal -- in the state's history. At the back of each volume
there is an index of places that is designed to get you from the place name
to the county. So far our output is only in print. Depending upon future
funding, we will convert the last of out manual methods to computer
graphics/GIS in the year or so ahead and expect to add a digital product to
the printed volumes not long afterwards.
If counties will help and you can't work with our printed material or wait
for our digital products, try the HUSCO (Historical U.S. Counties) files
for sale by the Geography Department at LSU (formatted for GIS
applications), which cover the whole nation for each federal census. Their
web site is http://www.cadgis.lsu.edu:80/geoscipub/ There also is the
collection of animated graphic files available from Gold Bug Software
(http://www.goldbug.com/AniMapDemo.html) *AniMap*, as the Gold Bug package
is called, covers the full range of years from the colonial period to the
present, with one map pe state per year, I believe; but it is not formatted
for GIS and does not pick up intra-year changes. Both these digital
products are at pretty small scales, similar to the maps in Martis's atlas,
but if you want to work with large regions or the whole country, that is
the only way to go.
Minor civil divisions? Since the counties are taking years of research,
the cities and towns would require tens or even a hundred times more
labor, etc. Therefore, their compilation for the entire country is not
likely to be practical in the lifetime of anyone reading this message. You
might find some local compilatons, however, but they would be difficult to
find.
At 04:47 PM 11/12/1997 EST, you wrote:
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>I am interested in finding digitized maps of U.S. congressional districts
>for the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (or any one of these decades). Does
>anyone know if these maps are available somewhere?
>
>Also, would anyone know where I might find equivalency files that list
>(for the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s) the following information: for each
>Minor Civil Division e.g. township), what county and what congressional
>district does it fall within?
>
> thanks, Carolyn Wong
>
> please reply to: [log in to unmask]
>
John H. Long
Editor, Atlas of Historical County Boundaries
The Newberry Library
60 W. Walton St.
Chicago, IL 60610
312/255-3602
e-mail: [log in to unmask]