See the people in your tree on a map
Ancestry.com now helps you visualize where important events occurred in the lives of your ancestors by placing their events on a map.
How do I use it?
We’ve updated the family tree so that just about anywhere we show a place, you can click on that place and see the link on the map. When we display the map we’ll also show all the events for the person. It’s been fun for me to start visualizing these places in my tree that I’ve been staring at for so many years. The map let you see the streets and roads, or select an aerial view to get satellite images.
We’ve worked hard to make this easy to use, but for any who want a fun tutorial, we’ve created a pretty great tutorial that walks you through all the map’s features. Just click the question mark in the green circle at the top right hand corner of the screen.
In addition to viewing the important places in your family members’ lives, you can also find places to help you in your research efforts. We have links to show local cemeteries and courthouses, and “Other Places” link displays a list of additional display options where you can find historical information—churches, historical sites, libraries and archives, and government buildings.
If the locations in your tree aren’t found by our mapping tool, we’ll help suggest possible matching locations to display. If you have no location entered for some of your events, the map feature allows you to enter in location information which will then be stored to your tree.
Got Suggestions or Feedback?
We have lots of plans for the future on how to make this feature even better than it is. Your feedback is a crucial part of the improvement process; please let us know what you think of the map feature and what improvements you would like to see. Add a comment or send me an email (kfreestone at tgn.com).
Bugs we’re working on
- A pop up will randomly flash when clicking between the pins and the side panel.
- If a group is open and you want to click a single pin that’s not in the group (appears grayed out), you have to mouse over the side bar to close the group before the single pin is clickable. This only happens if you want to click on the pin rather than on event in the list.
- Most of the point-of-interest data (cemeteries, courthouses etc.) shows up in the U.S., Canada, and to a lesser extent European countries. We are working on acquiring more relevant and accurate point-of-interest data.
Kenny,
Heheheheh-hohohoho, the googlemaps program and contents are highly buggy.
Among the bugs:
Quite unsuitable for genealogical applications because it has no historical boundary data. So (for example) persons who enter data related to places and events in what was then Prussia, cannot get a map with your link showing the boundaries of Prussia and the place location within it. If they do not enter the town, landkreis, or whatever name as existing now in Germany, Ukraine, Poland, Croatia or whatever, they cannot get a locational link in googlemaps. Kingdom of Wessex? Patuxent Hundred, Prince George’s Co, MD? You are out of luck. Oh, and if the person has spelt the name as given during the time of the Prussian Empire, it’s just too bad.
cannot locate a US County center.
cannot locate a Township, New England and Wisconsin Town, WV Magisterial Districts, Hundreds in DE and the many Beats and Judicial Districts in the southern US. This is connected with the silly and infuriating gedcom-platform failure to be able to deal with rurally-defined areas and to distinguish between villages and Townships by the same name. Try locating Bowling Green Township, Licking Co, OH and googlemaps will probably pinpoint Bowling Green, Kentucky. It will not say “oh, sorry, can’t find the place you mean, did you mean . . . .?” It will just establish the wrong link and you won’t know until later you look at a linked-up map.
has built-in biases and preferences. For Beloit, Ohio and Beloit, Kansas, you are likely to get Beloit, Wisconsin instead.
cannot locate cemeteries that are not already entered in the USGS GNIS database. You can, as I have, spend thousands of hours trying to establish links to the correct places. This is especially difficult when there are several same-named cemeteries even in the same Township in a given County. You gotta know the territory, and since GNIS maps (that googlemaps depends on) often do not show even Township names, and googlemaps does not ever specify what Township a place is in, there is a very high error rate.
These are just the major problems.
Don’t even try to think you can ‘train’ submitters of gedcoms to convert all the historical place names to currently-defined locations. Three people working 3 years might be able to create an adequate overall place-name converter.
Good luck to you.