It’s been quite awhile since my last Google Earth Adventure. I really love playing in Google Earth so I really need to make the effort for more of these!
Today’s adventure came about because I am in the midst of trying to plan a Genealogy trip. My first ever. I did make a trip to the Ohio Historical Society once, but technically my Mom has planned all those trips and I’m never quite prepared for being at these very helpful places. So I’m going to try my best to prepare. If anyone wants to leave tips for me, they would be most welcome! I’m probably going to spend a lot of time Googling.
One of my biggest “wants” is to visit the cemetery in Brooklyn where William H Moore is buried. I’m hoping that will verify some dates for me at the very least. Not to mention, I think it’s been awhile since they’ve been visited. So they’re do for some attention from family.
First thing I have to do is take my cemetery deed and locate where the graves are located. The cemetery in Brooklyn is HUGE to say the very least.
See that green area? 95% of that is cemetery. The rest is some parks and a golf course.Right smack in the middle of Brooklyn and Queens. I am definitely not wandering around blind in that. My next step would be to figure out from the map where the Orient Hill section is located. It would be too simple just to eyeball it and guess though. I’m a gadget girl, I like to use gadgets/programs for everything. So I go to the Add> Image Overlay option in Google Earth.
This throws the map image I downloaded right on top of the Google Earth view. In order to see both maps though, I took the transparency down to where both maps were legible.
This is the hardest part, using the green guidelines to rotate and resize the cemetery map to the proportions of the Google map. This probably took about 5 to 10 minutes with little tweaks taking the most of the time. I’m a perfectionist by nature. This is as close as I could get it, but it’s pretty close!
I turned the transparency back up so I could read where Orient Hill was located. Then I put a placemark there so I would lose it once I turned the image overlay off.
As you can see, my little placemark shows me just where in the big scheme of things Orient Hill is located. Depending on where we entered the cemetery, without proper prep, I could have gotten lost in there before I ever found what I was looking for.
I even isolated the Orient Hill section further by using PhotoShop to see just how big that section was in the scheme of things. Boy that’s a lot of area that I won’t have to cover now! Of course I also have the lot number, so I’m sure once I’m there I can narrow it down even further.
Disclaimer: I do not own these images. I just combined two resources into one to figure out where I was going. I don’t own Google (sadly). I don’t own Google Earth (sadly). I just like to play with maps really. I don’t have any association with Brooklyn, or the cemetery. Please don’t sue me for using these images as I have nothing to give you except my fluffy pajamas and losing those will make me cry. You don’t want to make me cry, right?
Excellent tutorial! I’m feeling very grateful that most of my people are buried in small, rural cemeteries.
Thanks Tonia! I am definitely feeling nervous about this cemetery, it’s the biggest I’ve come across so far. Mostly I’ve visited the more rural cemeteries. If you actually look at a map of this area there are 15 different cemeteries crammed into the space. The biggest of the cemeteries being The Evergreens. Oy!