When it comes to sweeping vistas on your family history research, few things can beat a good map. Stepping away from individuals and embracing the bigger picture and broader patterns can utterly transform your perspective on your ancestors. Whole generations, branches, even your entire family tree: maps invite you to witness the ebb-and-flow and movements of your ancestors over centuries.
So let’s see how to create a timelapse map of genealogical dates and places, using a data visualisation website called Flourish (https://flourish. studio/).
In four stages, you can turn those dates and places from your family tree into a beautiful map capturing your family’s meanderings over time. Here, I’m going to create a visualisation of ancestral birthplaces for the fictional DUTTON family. The more ambitious amongst you might also try mapping other events, such as marriages, deaths or baptisms.
STAGE 1: GATHERING YOUR DATA
Whether you store your family tree offline in a stand-alone package such as Family Tree Maker, or online on a site such as Ancestry, you’ll need to transform the date and place information from this digital family tree (stored in a file format
