Filtering map my ancestors

LegacyUser

Nicole Anderson said: I am making a family history trip plan for a future experience and would like to filter map my ancestors by burial locations only. It would be nice to see a list of the places we could stop to see graves and headstones of our family members without going to each name individually. If this has already been accomplished please help me find the resource to do so. Thanks!!!

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I do not think FamilySearch has any capability of doing that at all. However some third party tools might help.

All of my relatives and ancestors that are in the FamilyTree which I have looked at their data and vetted that it is actually true have been linked into my Ancestral Quest database. From there I can use the Name List feature to bring up a list of all those people.

In that list you can add any data from the person records, including burial places. I then just sort on that column which brings all the names in similar places together. Here is an example:



Note how due to the sorting, all of the statewide things are grouped, all of the counties are grouped, and all of the cemeteries are grouped. It's not a perfect sorting when folks make shortcuts in the locations, but by filling out all the details in location fields, it works pretty good for me.

I suspect other tools like Rootmagic or Legacy might also have these capabilities.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I also use Ancestral Quest and have been very successful in dealing with cemeteries. Two years ago I visited Beatrice, Nebraska, with a list of people who died there and perhaps were buried locally. The Find-a Grave had very few people entered into it, and because I've run into another cemetery that prohibits taken grave photos, I thought that might have been the case in Beatrice.

That wasn't the case, only that very little of the cemetery had been photographed. The cemetery association publishes to two-volume set of everyone buried in the cemetery, along with their location every few years. Not only did this help my locate the graves of my relatives, but for those I could not find (but were in the published set), the cemetery staff was extremely helpful in assisting me in finding those I had not been able to locate.

A lot depends upon the cemetery. Older cemeteries that do not recent burials will be the most difficult, but in many cases, the local genealogical/historical society will have books on who is buried in the local cemeteries. Depending upon the organization, those books often identify how to find the older graveyards, even those where the stones have been moved because a farmer is currently raising crops where the cemetery (usually a family graveyard) existed decades earlier.

What I do to narrow down is I use both the death and burial place fields and search on a place name within the place field. Ancestral Quest has an amazing search facility.

I believe that both Roots Magic and Legacy have similar capabilities, but the full search capabilities are usually not available in the free versions of the programs.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: The idea of being able to isolate your relatives has been brought up before (recently) and while it is a great feature that hopefully will be available at some future date, right now, it does not exist, except through the third party family tree management programs already mentioned.

All three (Ancestral Quest, Roots Magic, and Legacy) in their free version can download your ancestral lines to a new database, but it is time consuming and the PC used needs to have sufficient memory to handle the job. Some PCs lack the memory and will crash with an out of memory or similar error. Most of the problems that I've run into (in the past) with the feature have been resolved, so that doesn't happen much anymore.

Once your ancestral lines have been downloaded, then you can see what the programs can do and pick the best one for your purposes.