Aerial Photographs Online

By Barbara Ware

Vintage Aerial, an exhibitor at RootsTech 2020, has fourteen million aerial photographs of rural America spanning the 1960s to early 2000s. Their website allows you to search for buildings and farms across the United States at VintageAerial.com. You can search the site by state and county. If you locate and document a photo, you will receive credit toward the purchase of a photo. Of course, you can purchase a photo outright.

To search, click on the photos button on the top of the main page. There you can select a state and county from the dropdown menus. There are 650 rolls of film from Collin County, Texas, with about 23,400 photos. When I entered my grandparent’s address in McKinney, I didn’t find a photo. I then entered Church Street McKinney, Texas, where I found a photo of the L A Scott house located at West Louisiana and College Street just down the street from my maternal grandparent’s home.

But when I entered the Collin County town of Farmersville, Texas, where my maternal great grandparents lived, there were ten rolls mostly of farms in the area from 1984 and 1992. For the 1984 roll, there was also a map of the flight path taken in filming, which was just two blocks south of where they lived. I didn’t find their home, which was a few blocks from town. If you have rural relatives whose farms still existed in the 1960s to 2000s, you might find a photo.

Image credits: Mountain farm along Skyline Drive, Va., by Jack Delano (possibly), circa 1939. Call Number: LC-USF35-548. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print