Mapping Software?

[paul.deitch]

Looking for a solution to an idea!
I do family history and had an idea to plot birth/death locations with some sort of timeline effect for the people I have found - +-1800 people.

So I would like to automatically draw a line between the two individual related birth and death locations, possibly other residence locations and indicate some sort of time progression - may be colour change. Could be absolute dates or say, +50, +70.
In my dreams I could imagine that you hover the mouse over an individual and the relevant data is highlighted!
Anyone know of something that can do this or if something similar exists?

[curlyks2]

In no particular order:

• QGIS https://www.qgis.org/en/site/
• uDig http://udig.refractions.net/
• Google Maps (adding points/lines/info under MyMaps) https://www.google.com/maps
• OSM https://www.openstreetmap.org/

More at this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_informati...

[paul.deitch]

Thanks. Very interesting. I reckon that it will do it! Which is the easiest to learn

[Murph7355]

There are quite a few links in Google:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=family+tree+soft...

I would also think the sites that do this sort of thing will probably have decent software for doing it. Ancestry.com etc.

[beko1987]

As someone who uses Esri ArcMap for my day job, 70% of what you want needs to be in the base data for it to work correctly... It only looks pretty on the screen if it has the attributes to back it up.

I've not used the more modern ArcMap softwares (10.8 here and it does my work fine) but I did some training and had to use it and it does hover-over stuff quite nicely (again, EVERY piece of data you want to show in that popup needs to be an attribute next to your data.)

In terms of data, you'll need a PAF file with XY co-ordinates in order to plot the locations, background data layers, named place layers etc...

I'd see if any family tree type programs would do that maybe? Or keep your data sets small and clustered so on a single map extent you are seeing only what fits on screen nicely, so all is visible.

[sgrimshaw]

Family Historian 7 is certainly worth a look, there's a free trial, it has some mapping in it:

https://www.family-historian.co.uk/

Sample map can be seen on Amazon listing:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Family-Historian-Genealog...

Map My Family Tree can read files from many other Family Tree programs and will create maps etc, no free trial though:

https://genealogysupplies.com/product/Windows-Gene...

Edited by sgrimshaw on Friday 11th March 12:52