Author Topic: How do we as one-placers approach "mapping"?  (Read 4623 times)

PeterC

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How do we as one-placers approach "mapping"?
« on: 22 January 2016, 05:19:01 »
Mapping is a fascinating subject, indeed man has been trying understand his environment using maps for millennia.  With all the technological developments, mapping is now a significant global activity, and generates a lot of money for businesses. There are also many people worldwide who are involved in different aspects of mapping just for the love of it, and much of what is available is free. This means that the opportunities for those of us who want to use mapping have never been greater, but also that they have never been more complex.

I am confused by all the mapping possibilities and technologies, but hopefully with input from people who know, or who have successfully implemented useful maps, we can each find a few methods and techniques that we will find helpful in our one-place studies.



There is something about mapping a one-place study in this blog post about Community Mapping – Setting Boundaries and Getting a Sense of Place. The Society for One-Place Studies have also had a couple of Hangouts On Air on Community Mapping (Mar 2014), and their Mapping Project (May 2015). There are also a few articles in the Society's e-newsletter (Destinations - available to members only) about Community Mapping, and Mapping Your Migrants With GenMap.

Janet Few’s book "Putting Your Ancestors in their Place: A Guide to One Place Studies" (available from The Family History Partnership, or Amazon) has a chapter entitled "Reconstructing the Place" partly about mapping, as well as some projects to help you get started.

Among the One-Place Studies resources there are mapping ideas, encouragement to Pace your Study, and Study your Maps. There are also lists and examples of sources of historic maps and present day maps.

Wikipedia has an article about Family tree mapping and it says this is the process of geocoding places in family tree files to produce geospatial data suitable for viewing with a virtual globe or 2D mapping program. The availability of several free applications for viewing geographic data has led to a growing interest in the use of this technology by genealogists and family history researchers. The ability to share keyhole markup language (KML) files through sites such as Google Maps means that researchers can find matches based on geographic location rather than just a place name.
« Last Edit: 3 February 2016, 12:15:11 by PeterC »