ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how geographic information systems (GIS) technologies and methodologies can transform these suspect commercial products into rich historical resources. It utilizes GIS to correct the deliberate omission of poor farmers, white and especially black, from the 1879 landownership map of Garrard County. The chapter demonstrates the utility of two different features of GIS: its inherent capacity to aggregate ranges of information at a point in space and the utility of methodologies associated with GIS in analyzing the spatial distributions of populations. The most consistent finding is that black political participation was affected by the nature of the political community within which black voters resided. Kentucky alone among all states brought its large and newly freed African-American population into the electorate under oral or viva voce electoral laws. Viva voce elections, like all eighteenth- and nineteenth-century elections, were conducted out-of-doors, before interested observers.
