Maps

Here’s how to see maps of where our ancestors lived.  On the main menu of the home page, the People Button brings up a page and then on the bottom of that page is a View Genealogy Button.  Clicking on that button moves you to the searchable database.  The website database has now been connected to Google Maps.  All of the normal controls for Google Maps are present.  You can click on the icon on the top right corner of the map to enter Full Screen.  To come back out of Full Screen use the Esc Button on your keyboard.  The zoom in and zoom out buttons are on the bottom right of the screen.  All of the maps will have pins and I’ll explain them below.

If you’ve clicked on People and then the View Genealogy Button the page you come to shows a count of people by last name.  As an example, there are 192 people in the database with the last name of Barbieri. Relative to making a map you have two options.

• Option one – go to Find on the top right side of the menu.  Click on it and then click on Places and a list of places where family members have lived or traveled to appears.  The number in parenthesis is the number of locations in that place that had ancestors.  Your options are to click on the spyglass at the end of the name, click on Heat Map or click on one of the places.

• Clicking on the spyglass next to the name of a place produces a list of people who lived there.  Click on a person’s name for more information

• In lieu of clicking on the spyglass click on Heat Map and all those places appear on a map.  Click on a pin and it gives you the name of the location. Click on the location name and a list of people who lived there is displayed. Click on a person’s name and information about that person shows.

• Instead of clicking on spyglass or Heat Map click on a place, say NJ, and it produces a list of all places in NJ where someone lived.  Now you have two choices.  Click on Heat Map or click on the spyglass.  Clicking on either of them gives you the same options as above.

• Option two – on the page showing last names click on a name.  A screen now appears with everyone with that last name including their first name and other information.  Choose a first name and it takes you to a page with information about that person.  Included on that page now is a map showing every place that person traveled to or lived.  If that person never moved far from where they were born the map isn’t very interesting.  If they have, say they immigrated to another country, then it’s more interesting.  The map has pins with numbers that correspond to the events listed on the right side of the map.   Click on the pins for more information.  Full screen and zooming in is usually necessary to create some distance between the pins.

None of the maps include information about living people.  Out of respect for privacy, the only information that’s included on the website for anyone living is their name and their relatives.  Also, locations don’t include street address so if you zoom down to street level the map will take you someplace in that city but not to an actual address.