Family History and Google Earth

OK - I’ve been through my tree and confirmed all the places for the Skinner family.  I’ve excluded all the living Skinners (you should probably do this if you are going to upload your files to a publically accessible web site) and I’ve also excluded those people whose maiden name wasn’t Skinner (it gets a bit too busy to interpret otherwise).

 You can view it in Google Earth by clicking on the link below -

SkinnerTree20080625.kmz

Don’t forget to expand the time span slider in Google Earth (top right of screen). 

Let me know what you think.

Bye for now

Tim

This blog is dedicated to the discussion of using Google Earth to map out individuals from your family tree.  Google Earth can be downloaded for free at http://earth.google.com

So far I’m aware of the following methods of doing this -

1. By hand - i.e. Creating Placemarks for each event in an individuals life, then noting all the latitudes and longitudes (if you want to then create a path showing places people travelled to during their lives).
2. Using some software to help you.

Unless you have a very small family tree then method 1 is going to be extremely painful.

So far I think there are only 2 programs out there that can automate this for you -

There is a free project at http://www.geoged.com/.  This is all online based so you don’t have to install any software.  However, there are a few disadvantages as far as I can see -

• It expects you to have used strict formatting of your place names - so a city must always be in the same position in an address.  I tried my tree out with this site and unfortunately nearly all of my places were unrecognised.  This takes you on to another screen where you can locate your unrecognised places - which is where the second disadvantage arises -
• To confirm a place name you need to enter the country and the zip code.  A zip code?!  Given that zip codes weren’t invented until the 20th century I would expect very few people to be aware of the zipcodes for their historical place names.  Why not just prompt for the Street name, City, County, State etc at this point?
• Also it appears no date information is sent to Google Earth as the timespan facility didn’t show up when I tried it.

I’m sad to say this ruled this one out for me as I don’t know what the zip codes for the places in my tree - nor do I know a way of looking them up in the many countries my tree covers.

The second piece of software “Map My Ancestors” is available from http://www.familytreeassistant.com/ .  This takes a different approach as it is a program which you must download and install.  Unfortunately this program isn’t free but at least there is a trial to download (and it doesn’t cost very much either if you decide to buy it!). 

The program is relatively simple to use with a series of 3 screens guiding you through choosing who to include (you don’t have to include everyone in your tree), confirming your locations and finally launching them in Google Earth.

This program had much more success in locating my places (although you still need to go through and check them).  Where it got it wrong it gave the option of amending the search string (some alternatives are suggested) or by locating it on a map.  Locations that are confirmed can then be saved to a database so that they are remembered when you next try to locate the place.

Once you have confirmed your places you can view them in Google Earth.  As well as the placemarks for events, “Map My Ancestors” also generates a path following the events for which a date is known.

Lastly you can also save the output as a KMZ or KML file so you can share it between our friends or post it online.

You can download a trial or watch a couple of tutorial videos at http://www.familytreeassistant.com to get a better idea of how to use this software.

If you have produced a KMZ file (via any of the above methods) and you think it might be of interest why not post a link to it here?