RM’s ‘Places’ doesn’t quite have the flexibility for everything I want to geographically visualize, so I use Google Earth Pro, combined with downloads such as the Census bureau cartographic boundary files, ArcGIS, various historical map sites, Earth Point Township and Range shapefiles, etc.
I have my ancestors organized in folders by generation, then sub-folder by line, then sub-sub-folder by person.
Within each person, I plot their locations for vital events, census locations, etc. I also highlight their birth locations at the greatest granularity possible, whether that’s an entire state, a county, a city, etc. That gives me to ability to turn on or off entire generations at a time to see movement patterns, as well as individual lines, etc. A future effort is to create a per-Census folder so that I can inspect patterns that way.
There are also folders specifically for burial locations and speculative people. The burials folder is so that I can plan out future visitations in clusters, such as Texas + Arkansas and Massachusetts + Maine.
Two of the really helpful visualizations I can do:
- plot land grant locations
- historical map overlays.
Both have, in more than one case, helped explain things.
Example 1: Locating Levant Van De Bogart circa 1870
I’ve yet to find any land documents for that timeframe for him. But with a historical map overlay, I was able to identify more granularly where my 3x ggf lived. And, because the map is from 1875, I know his move to another place in Iowa happened after that timeframe and before the 1880 census.
Example 2: Locating Ben Cagle's land circa 1913
The town his family lived in no longer exists. But plotting their land tells me where they lived. He also had a brother and son acquire land adjacent.
Example 3: Proximity of 4x and 3x gg-parents
Plotting the land owned by the two families helped explain how two of my 2x gg-parents met. My 2x ggm was staying with her grandparents while the family moved. She subsequently met the son of my 3x gg-parents who were only about 3 miles away.
