Six months ago I bought a pair of custom topographical maps. One is my Area Of Interest (AOI) – that included my super-vulnerable home and our bug-out location, the homestead we bought and “rented” to offspring. The other map was a much more usable scale covering our Area Of Operations (AOO), that is the homestead neighborhood.
See more detail here: mapping your neighborhood
Because the kids are of the Snowflake Generation, the Me Generation, run to the tune of The World Owes Me A Living, the rental has become our new home. We are as busy as one-armed-paper-hangers cleaning up, remodeling and moving in. This has increased my focus on our AOO.
It occurred to me that our podunk county just might be able to help me with a custom street map providing a parcel-by-parcel view that would lend itself for identifying my neighbors, and, what really motivated me, was being able to associate the neighbors I am meeting regularly with their locations. A high second priority was to map human, physical and geographical resources for mutual aid in a disaster.
The woman in our county’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was a dream to work with, had excellent tools and printed out for $25, a 24″ x 36″ map with Google-Earth photo image faded in and street, road, driveway, house number information predominately visible.
It is a masterpiece … a SuperPower Tool. I HIGHLY recommend you visit your county office to see if they can do a similar project for you.
I am anxious to get my studio set up, featuring this map framed, protected with plastic and ready to have last names labeling each parcel. I will build a physical, paper Rolodex that will support the map with detailed data.
The county also provides lookup of parcel ownership data. I may be doing a rapid fill-in utilizing that resource when the dust settles around our move in. We are currently in the middle of “Winter Is Coming and WE WILL BE PREPARED for it”.
