Has anyone considered a heat map for known ancestor birth and death locations?

Question

Wouldn't it be cool to be able to generate a map of our ancestors places of birth and places of death? This would allow us at a glance to show how our ancestors moved over the years. If you could look at the movements of descendants of different children or your entire watchlist on a heat map, I think that it would be an impressive tool.

Answer 1

I'd absolutely love mapping options, but I think it would be very difficult to implement because of vague and changing placenames. I suppose an option to enter approximate latitude and longitude might be the first step to making this possible, or some cooperation with Google maps to let you put a marker on a map.

Comments

Thank you for your insight!

Answer 2

As Deborah mentioned, mapping options would be limited due to historical place names. The first step would probably creating a relational database of some sort that allows us to tie in historical entities with current locations.

Now, if you use FamilySearch to maintain a tree, there is a mapping option available at RootsMapper.

If you are able to do a little work on it (before it is disabled in Dec 2019), you can formulate your own map using Google FusionTables.

There is also OurFamilyHistory, PedigreeMap, Family Atlas, and a host of other options that you would have to build manually.

Comments

Thank you for the suggestions. I will look into them.