Can I use OSM to produce maps tracing the history of my village?

As Jonas_ says, the main OSM database is really for mapping things as they are.

You could however use some of the OSM software that is available to produce older maps if you wanted. In theory you could set yourself up with a whole copy of the software stack which stores the main database, and the database used by Mapnik for rendering. This might be a lot of work and can be tricky to do for a beginner.

Perhaps simpler would be to use JOSM to draw your maps, then save your work as a .osm file WITHOUT uploading it, and use something like Maperitive to render a map from the .osm file.

You can use OSM for how the village is today, but not so much about how it was before.

See also Gnonthgol's answer to Does OSM use any historic data? or want to?

I am working on a larger scale of this, developing a set of "snapshots" of the whole of Devon intended to stretch back as far as I can find data for, but particularly focused on the period from 1600 to 1840, when my ancestors lived in the town of Moretonhampstead.

So far I have used data from planet.OSM, OS OpenData, OS historical maps, Madgery's roman roads, Lewis's 1840 map and a few others I have found online. I hope to obtain as many tithe maps as I can (being a pensioner cost is a substantial issue).

I'm using a Linux machine for the bulk of the work. postgis database for storage, osmosis for importing OSM data, Qgis for data picking, format conversions and georeferencing, Mapinfo for editing and merging.

postgis http://postgis.refractions.net/ , osmosis http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~bretth/osmosis-build/osmosis-latest.zip & qgis http://www.qgis.org/wiki/Download are available for windows, mac & linux MapInfo is a windows program that I am able to run in windows emulation on linux.

qgis could replace mapinfo but I prefer its editing.

As EdLoach said, in principle you could use the standard OSM editor to progressively delete streets, getting backwards in time and having screencopies or exports at each step.

Anyways, I definitely recommend not to do this before having got some practice (what about improving your village map? I'm sure there are some details missing: stairs in the old town, streetnames missing...) because otherwise there is a HUGE risk that you inadvertently save your work (of progressive destruction), which would be a real pain here indeed.

So, sincerely, just don't consider doing this until you have indeed some experience with the editor (at least you'll have understood adding new streets is difficult ;-)

Hervé

You are free to use and copy openstreetmap so you could within a paint program delete it back in time in stages,If you know them,saving these backward developments. If you search the wiki you should find some out of copyright maps which may help. but please don't delete us back to 1805. good luck!

Ian, if you want to stay with online editing I fear it's not possible to both edit then locally save the changes. Online, you can edit, you can save locally the existing map, but not changes you just made. This comes basically from the way tabs are working in the editor: you have one tab for viewing, one for editing, one for exporting.

Now, as you can save the original map locally, you could very well reopen this local map with one of the local editors, change it at will (e. g. by progressively substracting streets to get back in time?) and save these successive states.

Also, remember if the issue is only to start from the present state then suppress some streets, you could easily perform this with any vectorial graphic editor starting from e. g. an export to svg format --but this will work only for street suppression, not full edition.