Places and the Map: Seeing Where Your Family Lived

Every dated fact in a GEDCOM can carry a place. The Places page collects all of them and shows them two ways: as a browsable list, and as a map.

The list

One entry per distinct place string in the file, with a count of events there and the people linked to it. Places written in the usual comma-separated form (town, county, state, country) are grouped into an expandable tree, largest jurisdiction first: open a country to see its regions, open a region to see its towns. Within each level, places are ordered by how many events happened there, so the top of the list is where the family actually lived. Search to find a town. Each place shows whether it was located on the map, and whether its coordinates came from the file itself or from GED-VIEW's own lookup.

The map

Each place becomes a pin; bigger counts get bigger pins. Click a pin to see the events there and the people involved. Filters narrow by event type, so births only or deaths only can show migration more clearly than everything at once.

The map itself is served entirely by GED-VIEW: countries at first, then regions, lakes and rivers, towns and villages, and from about the scale of a county the full detail of shorelines, roads and built-up areas. Detailed map information has to come from somewhere, and on most genealogy websites it comes from an outside map provider that is told which part of the world you are looking at every time you zoom. Here it does not: everything the map shows, at every zoom, comes from GED-VIEW's own server, so no one else ever learns where your family lived.

How places are located

GED-VIEW has its own geocoder, built into the app. It runs in the browser and looks place names up in data that ships with the site. Nothing is sent to any map service or any server. Place names, like everything else in the file, stay on your computer.

GED-VIEW's place data covers every populated place in the world under every name it has had, in every language and script, plus former countries and provinces. So "Wien, Austria", "Vienna, Austria" and "Beč, Austrija" land on the same pin, "Königsberg" finds Kaliningrad, "Danzig" finds Gdańsk, and a village written as "Bela Crkva, Yugoslavia" is found near where Yugoslavia was. Accents do not matter: "Bec" and "Konigsberg" work too. The spellings remain separate entries in the list (they are, after all, different spellings in your file; the Issues page points them out so you can pick one), and the pin's popup lists each spelling with how many events use it. GED-VIEW never rewrites what the file says.

It is not perfect. A very common village name with no county or country next to it cannot be told apart from its namesakes, and a place recorded only in your file (a farm, a house, a spelling the data does not have) cannot be located. GED-VIEW lists those so you can see what to check. Geocoding by the date of the event (so a place is looked up under the name and borders it had at the time) is planned.

When the same town appears more than once

The geocoder merges what it can onto one pin. What it cannot merge shows as separate entries and separate pins. The place-name standardization guide covers finding those and fixing them in the program that owns the tree.

Export

The map exports to PDF and PNG.

Next

Open Places and look at the top of the list. That is where the family lived.