Ancestral Mapping Using Google Earth Pro
Family history researchers gain much satisfaction from discovering and recording information about their relatives and ancestors but sharing that information in a spatially relevant visual form can be even more rewarding. Google Earth Pro is a free downloadable application with many useful features for genealogists. This webinar will demonstrate how diary details chronicling an immigrant family’s six-week journey from Ireland to southern Ontario in 1847 at the height of the Great Famine were mapped using Google Earth Pro. Participants will learn how to add informative placemarks and lines on a map, use polygons to highlight regions of interest, run automated tours of mapped points, include image overlays to give context to family history, access historical imagery to link family stories with land surface changes over time, and share and store mapped details. How diary details were turned into a mapping and timeline activity for students will also be explained.
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David Joiner
David Joiner has recently retired from thirty-three years of teaching Canadian and World Studies at both public and private schools in Ontario. From 1989-2022, David taught geography courses and later served as a department head at St. Andrew’s College in Aurora, Ontario. He has also taught undergraduate courses in geographic data analysis and mapping at Queen’s University in Kingston. His research background includes microclimatology studies in temperate forests and climate change investigations in the Boreal Forest of Northern Manitoba. David has been conducting family history research since childhood and has expanded his focus to include both genetic genealogy and ancestral mapping. He feels that modern mapping tools and geographic information systems (GIS) allow genealogists to record, analyze, and share family history details in an interesting way that yields greater historic and geographic context.
