Google Maps meets familysearch = awesome!!

LegacyUser

Craig Salmond said: I think it would be awesome to be able to click on the location for an ancestor (birth, death, marriage, etc) and have a google maps JavaScript popup so that you could see a map of locations related to your ancestors.

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laralee said: Thank you for this suggestion. Maps can be very useful and informative when doing Family History work. The engineers will look at this as a potential future enhancement.

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Jackie Bogedahl said: Sounds like a great idea.

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Cathy Anderegg said: Maps was part of new FamilySearch and I wondered if they were going to add it to Family Tree. I have my doubts.

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m said: Maps was my favorite part of newfamilysearch and I hope it comes back. Some ancestors were earliest members of the Mormon church in New York and traveled to Utah with stops in camps along the way. I had created custom events with the exact geographic locations so you could see the travels of the Mormon pioneers on the map. One might have a map with New York, Mormon camps in various states all the way to Utah. Another was Mormon martyr and his map went from New York then various states and then had the accurate geographic location of his death. One was born along the way and then his map continues to Utah. I thought adding these pioneer travels and the maps enriched the FamilySearch experience.

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Suzanne Velma Tilley said: I think its a given and a MUST!! So often I read indexed & arbitrated records for my family & find so many mistakes in place names! All they have to do is look at the map & see the correct name then correct it.

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Chas Howell said: Suzanne Tilley
1. Be sure the project rules allow you to correct place names.
2. A map name today may not be the name used in the time period of the project you are indexing.

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Paul said: Suzanne

Chas is correct - the original place names should not be changed whilst indexing. I can think of three examples of alternative spellings for place names in England. So if you came across Hebron it should not be changed to Hebburn: likewise, Whittlesea / Whittlesey and Oulden / Oulton. Some spellings have changed over the past hundred years, others are still accepted today as alternatives.

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Juli said: Suzanne, you also have to consider that the placenames attached to an indexed record may not have been indexed, but attached by FamilySearch in the pre- or post-processing. The Hungarian civil registration indexing project, for example, has only name and date fields; the indexers and arbitrators/reviewers have zero input on how the location ends up labeled (or mislabeled, as is unfortunately the case in quite a few cases that I've encountered).

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Tom Huber said: On Maps. Check out the talk given at Roots Tech on the Library of Congress and its website. They have maps that are available that provide the names of the owners of the property. The video of the session is at https://www.rootstech.org/video/hidde...

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Suzanne Velma Tilley said: I know that all of you are correct in your assumptions as I know from doing Genealogy for 20 years now. However, that was not my point nor the case of examples I have found that were definitely indexed as shown in the sources for the individual with the original document often attached. The indexer clearly mis-read the name & then the arbitrator did the same. One example was for my grandmother's family roots location of Greensville, West Flamboro, Wentworth, Ontario, Canada shown as West Hamboro; another showed Greensville as Aensville or something like that. I have found countless others over the years. I thought Google Maps or other maps would help. In the case of Engand for example if prior to 1874, that map could be attached to those files into the program.

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Tom Huber said: Yup... Places (and some actual entries) are often incorrect when compared against the original images.

Catalog entries can be fixed while others cannot.

When using the source linker, I will not add the event date and place until I am sure it is correct, but especially for census records as these contain the most errors.

The problem with Google Maps is that they are working with the current geopolitical divisions and as such, are not a lot of help. That was one reason why I suggested (especially for the United States), the Library of Congress online collection of maps.

Another good source is the FamilySearch wiki, which often tracks changes in boundaries through the years (United States) and provides valuable insight into the history of a place outside the United States.

However, it is not complete. One really has to go digging to find good maps of many areas of the world as they applied to earlier times. For instance, when my immigrant ancestor came over, where he was from was part of the Holy Roman Empire (this is northern Germany, between Denmark and Holland).

It took some real digging to find a map that actually represented the area in the early 1600s. Medieval maps are likely harder to find, plus, the ones in the library are huge and trying to copy them is impossible on a copier. I am thankful for my iPad with its built-in camera.

There are out-of-print books, such as one for Ireland that had both ancient and modern maps of Ireland. I think there was an equivalent one for England and Wales. These were produced in the 1950s, so they are still basically "in copyright" unless the author has released them to public domain. (I don't have my copy handy or I would see if it is available somewhere.)

But another source for finding if FamilySearch has a map (digitized or not) is to check the Catalog under the name of the Country.

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TManning said: Thanks for adding that. I did not know it

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Suzanne Velma Tilley said: Thanks for your input. I have no trouble finding the correct place names as I usually know what they are to begin with. The problem arises as I said. I have also found 'antique' maps when I have searched online resources.

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Suzanne Velma Tilley said: I definitely will - thanks Tom!

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Alex Sellers said: IRRC This is in the works for the FamilySearch Places, they're currently auditing the entries to make sure coordinates are correct, places are attached to correct localities (I.E. a cemetery is attached to the nearest town not the county), etc.

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Suzanne Velma Tilley said: Great! Thank you.

LegacyUser

James Cobban said: The absence of this feature is one of the reasons that I do not use either FamilySearch or Ancestry to display my family tree. The main reason is that I first put my family tree up on the web in 1993 and the services available simply didn't exist then to create a tree that could be managed by multiple family members so I had to create my own web site.

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Gordon Collett said: The absence of a map? It's right there under Timeline on a person's page and has been for quite a while now:

LegacyUser

David Newton said: Ancestry has a map as well. Methinks a little more observation is needed when looking round websites!

LegacyUser

Newbie_! said: on your mobile app
one can view back 6 generations on the map - great feature!
? Is this available also on the desktop version? where?

feature requests:
- add more generations
- add filter for any geo event (birth, marriage, death, ...)