Wedding day: April 20, 1946

This week I tried out the “My Maps” feature in Google maps.  “My Maps” allows you to create custom maps and add your own content to specific locations including images and notes.  For my first project, I used the names and addresses of people who attended the wedding of my grandparents, George and Libby Krtouš, in 1946.

Most of the guests lived in Chicago’s Czech neighborhoods which included Little Village, Lawndale, and Pilsen.  The Czechs began to disperse beginning in the 1930s, many moving to the western suburbs.  You can see the spread of attendees and the beginnings of that shift westward. This isn’t a large dataset, but I think it is a nice illustration of a general trend, a snapshot of a community in transition.