Ancestry Magazine

What’s the shortest distance between two—or 20—points? An electronic map of your ancestors’ migration.

American families rarely stay in one place. Whether your ancestors were early colonial settlers or 20th century immigrants, your people were on the move.

Just as maps were vital to explorers and travelers in the past, they are indispensable to us today. But now, instead of paper copies, we rely on digital versions. And we can use them to get a look at ancestral paths.

How? With free services like Google Maps, you can track your ancestors’ migration by marking the trail on Web-based maps. You can add family notes, dates, and even pictures at every location and share the project with anyone you choose.

Start by logging on to Google Maps http://maps.google.com. If you don’t have a free Google account, create one—you won’t need it to view a map, but you will need it to create your own.
Select the “My Maps” tab on the left side of the screen. Then select “Create a New Map.” Decide what you want to map, like a family’s movements around the country or a map showing the homes of a great-grandparent’s descendants. Determine if your map will be public or unlisted (Web search engines can help others locate a public map). Then plot.

To do this, you type a location—a specific address or just a city and state—into the search box. A green arrow will pinpoint it on the map. The controls on the left of the map let you zoom in or out and pan left or right. Add a placemark and a description to the location by clicking on the bulb icon

Continue adding places to your map. Use the toolbar to connect locations with lines or highlight an area.

Any photos you’d like to add need to have unique URLs or web addresses. To accomplish this, I created a Web album at Picasa http://picasa.google.com, another free service from Google. There I uploaded documents and photos and each one was assigned a URL. Back at my Google map, I selected a plotted location, clicked “Edit,” chose the “Rich Text” option, clicked on the “Insert Image” icon (far right), and added the photo’s URL into the pop-up dialog box.

If you’re still wondering why you’d want to map your family history, take a look at one of my maps www.lauraprescott.com/links.htm#maps. You’ll get a better idea of how family heritage looks when you see it spread out over the countryside, complete with gravestones, family photos, and more. Then you’ll be ready to create your own.

Laura G. Prescott can be reached at www.lauraprescott.com.