1 Ancestry Search Engine Problem That Needs Mapping

Your Ancestry search engine has a problem! It’s not so much that Ancestry is becoming a lackluster research platform, it’s just that we’ve become so finicky! Genealogical research has advanced so far in the last 5 years alone that what once seemed like alchemy is now commonplace and ill-adjusted to current market demands in terms of the expectation of service. Having billions of records available is awesome.

Being able to build family trees with 100,000+ ancestors is awesome. Not being able to correlate those effectively leaves thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of stones unturned in terms of our genealogical discoveries – that is NOT awesome.

Here’s 1 Ancestry search engine feature I can’t believe doesn’t exist: GEOLOCATION. Simply put, the ability to map out where our ancestors lived, the paths they took over time, and the ability to visually connect specific places across multiple families across time.

FURTHER READING: “Matches Map On Ancestry To Revolutionize Genealogical Research”

Having a GEOLOCATION feature attached directly to our family tree would make Ancestry’s stock skyrocket. Imagine with me a button that was included as a part of our regular search field that said “geolocate” and would allow you to search for ancestors within your tree according to place. It would then display all of those ancestors on a map with pin locations for each and mouse-over information including BMD dates.

This would be different from using the “Place you ancestor might have lived” box within the main search function which is in many respects like a misbehaving child that needs a good spanking. It works, but often excludes results that should be included as you narrow the search parameters – that’s just plain counterproductive.

What I’m really suggesting here is a MAPPING function, something that is visually similar to the DNA Story results page. Something that MyHeritage is already doing.

With this proposed new Ancestry search engine feature you would be able to select from your tree any surname you wanted and Ancestry would map it out for you in terms of exact longitudes and latitudes, potentially going back as many generations as you have in your tree. You would also be able to expand that search along any of the collateral lines that you have in your Ancestry tree if you so desired.

Ideally, this GEOLOCATION feature would even be able to map out your ENTIRE Ancestry family tree! How cool wold that be? It would be entirely customizable: it could map out single surnames, or individual branches, or all the families that lived within any given state or county. All you would need to do would be to adjust a slider to limit or expand the range of dates that you would like included. Imagine that!

This Ancestry search engine feature would necessarily include a Google Maps overlay where you could scroll in and out of the map and be able to visually catalogue clusters of ancestral hits within a single area. For example, if you have family a few generations back that were sprawled out around the western side of Tennessee then you would click on the “geolocate” button and enter in your parameters and, BAM, they would all be effortlessly displayed.

It would be no different from using Google Maps to find shops or restaurants!

I have an ancestor who is my 3x great-grandfather and one of my favourite people, he has such a neat story. He was born in Virginia about 1822 and brought my family to Texas sometime around 1875; however, in between those dates he moved around quite a bit which caught my attention as that was not the “norm” for our family. Well, in order to keep track of all of his movements across time and space (including the birth of his many children in different states and counties) I actually decided I was going to create a visual aid of his travels on Google Maps. I did, here’s what it looks like.

I created this map back in 2013 and it was then that I thought how wonderful and powerful it would be to have a MAPPING tool available on Ancestry. It’s 2018 and I think it’s time Ancestry devises a way to do this. My idea is that the Google Maps feature could also interface with the Migrations feature within our DNA Story page. I imagined it looking something similar to the DNA Story screenshot above, just a heck of a lot fancier!

Looking at our ancestors’ movements from a large-scale perspective is one thing, but I’d also like to see this proposed GEOLOCATION feature be able to pinpoint the addresses of family members that lived within a single neighborhood or county during any given range of time.

Below is another map I created attempting to visualize where my great-grandfather and his brother lived during the period of 1904 and 1950 in New Haven, Connecticut. In my head, all I would need to do would be to go to my great-grandfather’s profile and click “geolocate,” then enter in any temporal and areal parameters; there would also be buttons to include any other people within the family tree in this search. Kinda like when you’re adding pictures, documents, or records, you can select “+Add” and “Link to another person.” “Voila!” … “Let her rip tater chip!”

Imagine the power to plot the movements of siblings over time in relationship to one another. Imagine being able to plot where children moved in relationship to their parents over time. Imagine the power to plot backwards and forwards through time and space where antecedents and descendants moved in relationship to all others. This Ancestry search engine feature would allow you to do all that and more.

I just have to ask one question: “am I a genius or am I a genius?” This GEOLOCATION feature would contribute profoundly to the ability of any genealogical researcher out there to overcome leaps of logic and presumption in that it would allow us to see information spatially.

It has the potential not only to tie up family history loose ends but also to create new, unforeseen bridges between data that we may not have anticipated. If done right, this ‘1 Ancestry search engine feature that needs mapping’ would allow us to search for ancestors on a map as easily as we can for coffee shops.