Sheila writes: === I did try that years ago but was not satisfied with the accuracy of the overlay. I have the first edition of Mitchell's book, and maybe the quality of the maps has improved since. === (I occasionally get chastised for communicating off-list........when listers feel I should be putting it "all" on the list. Well, here's your chance to see just how boring much of my letter-writing can be.) Sheila, I have been surprised in the opposite direction......just how precise and accurate BM's maps really are. Here's a blurb (with additions) I wrote several years ago on this matter. ............................................................................ .................... A few years ago, I made transparencies of all of the Republic's civil parish maps in the NGAI, and then took them into my photo darkroom and spent quite a few days projecting them onto the series of Discovery maps and tracing the parish border outlines onto the maps, using a highlighter. It was quite a job - 2400 plus parishes, and the maps in the Atlas are all different scales (Carlow is as large as Galway !!). Depending on the desired degree of precision, a simple Photoshop or copy machine scale alteration may not be good enough. As civil parishes follow townland boundaries, and probably 80 percent of townland borders coincide with rivers and streams, it is possible to compensate for any distortions induced by the nature of the small maps when they are projected onto the Discovery maps. I discovered (that's what Discovery maps are for [gr]) that even when the scale was correct, there were still some instances where a bit of stretching and shifting of the Disc. map relative to the transparency was necessary before I could properly position the outline of a given civil parish. If this sounds a bit obsessive-compulsive (it probably is), it's because I felt that if I were going to spend that much time on the job, I ought to do it right the first time. I use the Disc. maps many times a day, and usually use the civil parish outlines as starting-points for searches. I wouldn't be with these modified maps, now. I doubt if the borders shown for the RC parish maps are so rigorous as the CP maps, as there were apparently constant changes being made to the religious parishes over the decades. In any case, I feel that my maps, with the civil parishes drawn-in, plus all of the other annotations, glosses, page references from various books - and even entire descriptions inked-in in fine print........I really don't think there would be any room for the RC parishes [gr]. I tend to content myself with comparing the RC and the civil parish maps from the Atlas, side by side (I have both editions of the Atlas), and go from there as a basis for defining the RC parish coverage. Everytime I use these Discovery maps with the civil parishes drawn-in, I am amazed that such apparent inconsistencies as the little "bumps" that don't follow the usual river boundaries, etc., and look like errors in Mitchell's maps.......turn-out to be accurate when I compare with the Townland Index maps (which show all of the townland boundaries in the 26 counties). In short, I'd vouch for all of this civil parish maps and for their accuracy.....and precision. Pete .................................................... Pete Schermerhorn, in the glorious Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts </HTML>