The David Rumsey Map Collection is a free online portal that will help you put your family history on the map. Well, on lots of maps potentially! Housed at Stanford University Library, the collection has over 150,000 maps. More than 90% of them are now online at DavidRumsey.com.
The collection’s scope is global, but it is especially strong for maps of the United States with holdings including property maps (which may show boundaries, land use, and landowners’ names), insurance maps (which detail neighborhoods, roads and buildings), railroad maps, military maps, topographical maps and more.
Searching the David Rumsey Map Collection by Maps
Here at DavidRumsey.com, start your search in the main search box, where you’ll enter keywords associated with the place you’re researching (for example, Leavenworth Kansas). You can use terms like and, or, or equals to make your searches here more powerful, or wildcard characters to help with spelling and name variants (a question mark to replace one character, and an asterisk to replace several characters).
You can choose between searching between “by Maps” and “by Text on Maps” on both the search boxes on the main homepage (#1) and the search bar on the upper right of the website (#2). Searching “by Text on Maps” is a new feature (as of 2026) that is a new and experimental feature introduced to a subset of maps within the collection.
After typing in your search terms, press the magnifying class (on the homepage) or “Go” in the upper-right searchbar.
Your search results will appear in the site’s LUNA Viewer. You can customize your search experience using the gear icon: size of search results, number of results that appear on one page, and even the background color. Use filters along the left size to refine your search, such as for more-specific locations or a year of creation. Scrolling down, you can also search by specific map creators.
Using a filter of 1887 brings up results that appear to be several pages from a digitized map book, which includes all kinds of supporting pages that are not actually maps. But they can help you understand this place—which is ultimately your goal when searching for maps, right?
Click a result to explore that map in greater detail. On the right, you can zoom in or out, showing you great details (even down to specific buildings). Use the arrows to move around the image, or the home icon to return to the original view. You can also rotate an image or take it full screen.
At left, you’ll also find the Image Manipulation Toolbar. In addition to rotating the image, you can change the image’s brightness, contrast, or color saturation. There are even icons for converting the image to black-and-white, or for inverting the maps colors. (Some maps are easier to read this way.) Hit the Reset icon if you want to return to the original image presentation.
Some maps have been digitally overlaid on modern maps, and you can explore them using the Georeferencer. This is a great way to see where an ancestral location is today. Use the slider tool over here to make the map more opaque or transparent. There are some more advanced tools here too, including an overlay tool that lets you overlay multiple maps.
You can also view maps embedded in Google Maps or Google Earth, via the View Collection tab on the home page or within Georeferencer by clicking the globe icon on the left of the screen.
Versions of this article was published in the March/April 2013 and July/August 2022 issues of Family Tree Magazine. Last updated: April 2026
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