If you are a genealogist you know that one of the biggest conferences of the year is happening right now in Salt Lake City.  While I was unable to attend in person, multiple sessions are live-streamed allowing us to watch sessions from home.  One of my favorite speakers, Crista Cowan, just finished a session on what’s new at Ancestry.com and as always I am excited about some of the updates to the site and app. The one I want to share right now is the mapping feature on your family tree in the Ancestry app.

How many times have you been somewhere that is significant to your family and you wondered just what happened there.  Some of us find it challenging to recall precisely where our 5x great grandfather was born when we might be standing in that very locale.

Ancestry’s new mapping function takes care of that for you.  Included in the mapping is a filter where you can chose events such as birth, marriage, death, burial, residence or all events.  I can’t even explain how great this is, but I can show you!

 

The mapping in the app is global and seems pretty accurate down to the street-level.  In this example, my 3x great grandfather Gottfried Friedrich Raiffeisen lived and died in Hamm an der Sieg in the Rhineland-Pfalz area of Germany, about 50 KM east of Cologne.  I know because I have been there.  The house in which the Raiffeisen family lived is now a hotel and I have stayed there a few times, initially on my own, then with family.  It sits pretty much where the green circle is on the map.  On the close up map you can see in the bottom center the words: “Evangelische Kirche” or Evangelical Church.  The church, located just across the street from the Alte Vogtei Hotel / Raiffeisen House.  In 2000, my parents and I attended a service there.  It was a magical experience.  Now I can share my photos with the maps to indicate more clearly where events occurred.

I love this feature!  Ancestry.com has updated other tools and will make more announcements over the next few days.  Stay tuned!