I'm a map geek

I think of things spatially, so you will see me trying to take information and put it on a map.  I think it helps tell the story.  A colleague showed me google fusion tables and I wanted to experiment with it.  Here is my first result.   

https://goo.gl/hZthX1 

 So, what is it?  I took the birth locations for 12 generations of both the Wright and Smith branches and mapped them to the best of my ability.  By uploading them to a fusion table.  Not only will it allow you to show all the locations on a map but it will generate a heat map showing where the family lived for a extended period of time.  You can also filter on a bunch of different parameters.  There are some conventions and oddities in the data you show be aware of.  

• The Branch column represents the branch of the tree you are looking at.  In this case, either Wright or Smith.
• The PersonID column gives an number for each person.  These are unique per branch, so There are 2 people with ID 1.  David Sanders Wright for the Wright branch and Florence Edna Smith for the Smith branch.
• I've separated the generations by branch as well.  The ones starting with S are the Smith branch and W are the Wright branch.
• The birth year is the best I have.  It get a little odd because of the calendar switch in the 1700s
• If I only have the country of birth I have given it coordinates in the ocean.  That way, they aren't overshadowing the better data.
• If the Dup column is labeled yes, it means that the person has appeared in the tree more then once.  This is because we has some cousins that got married.  Not really that surprising when you think about how few people were in early New England.
• I need to do a better job with the Immigrant column.  If it is marked as Yes, then that ancestor immigrated to the new world.  A Old means that they where born and died in Europe, and a New means they where born in the New World.  If blank, i don't know where they where born.

 

  As an example, I filtered that attached map to just the immigrants, and excluded the ones where I only knew the country of origin.