Welcome to the Digitized Georeferenced Pitzman's 1878 Atlas of St. Louis City and County!

Happy Labor Day! St. Louis Genealogical Society’s volunteers want to help you celebrate this holiday weekend with a special gift to everyone, regardless of your StLGS membership status. Our amazing map guru, Jim Bellenger, has been laboring for months on an indexed, digitized version of one of the classic and beloved resources for twentieth-century St. Louis city and county residents, the 1878 Pitzman atlas. Pitzman’s New Atlas of the City and County of Saint Louis contains pages of detailed maps showing locations of specific landowners and many of the structures on their properties, as well as other landmarks, such as schools, houses of worship, cemeteries, and some businesses. For many years, StLGS was able to reproduce this atlas in book form for sale, but we have had to discontinue that option due to skyrocketing publication costs. The atlas was digitized many years ago and offered for sale by our society as a CD (and StLGS continues to sell those CDs in our secure online store.) However, never before has anyone been able to connect you directly to the page and location of everyone mentioned in the atlas . . . until now!

The digital images are currently online at the State Historical Society of Missouri, and with their generous permission, we have been able to share their images in our newly enhanced database. This is an ongoing project and not all of the pages are complete, but we wanted to let you know about it so you can get started checking it out. The page where you will want to begin your exploration is called “Pitzman’s 1878 Atlas Georeferenced.”  (Right now, it’s located on our website under Community/Maps/Pitzman’s 1878 Atlas Georeferenced.)

When you get to the page, read the introduction at the top, and then scroll to the links under the atlas cover image. The first link takes you to the “starter page,” called “Pitzman’s 1878 Atlas Pages.” It may take a few seconds for this page to load, as it’s very large, but when it does, you will see a Google map with the St. Louis area covered by the atlas outlined in red. Use your mouse’s scroll wheel or the + and – signs in the upper left corner to zoom into the map to see detail. And here’s a really nice feature. Look at the area to the bottom left of the page (red arrow in the image below) for the little sun and moon icons. That slider will allow you to adjust the transparency on the page so you can get a better idea of exactly where your area of interest is on the current map that is underneath the older image.

When you find an area that you want to investigate further, click into its boundaries to get a pop-up window with the neighborhood and page number. Clicking on the link will take you to the next image, the atlas page that can be enlarged to show all the details.

When you are ready, click back to the “Main Page,” where you started, and scroll down to the link for the index page. Here you will find, as the title describes, the atlas index arranged by location and pages. Armed with your page number, you can find your property and click on the correct township/range section. Following our Kirkwood example, we can scroll down the page to Kirkwood, page 49, on which we can zoom in to see all the details. Note that down on the bottom it says “Property Points Forthcoming.” This is one of the pages that is not yet georeferenced, but it will be before too long.

Let’s move to Webster Groves and look at a page that is finished.  Notice that the various buildings and houses have been plotted on the map, and, if you scroll under the image, you will come to the list of property owners. The index, as you can see below, includes name, amount of acreage, name of the subdivision or area, what kind of structure is on the land, and a “jump to property” link. Click there, and you will go to the section of the map where your person’s property is located. (See below for N. D. Allen.)

We are excited to make the completed parts of this project available to you, and we hope you will check back frequently as more indexed pages are added. Have fun finding your people!