April – Ancestral Mapping Using Google Earth Pro – David Joiner
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 time-line activity for students will also be explained.