Greater Cleveland Genealogical Society of Ohio

16 October 2023  7:00pm  via  Zoom

“Building Community Genealogies from Historical Maps”  

As genealogists, we are accustomed to charting relationships and drawing inferences, and we frequently compare the effort to solving puzzles or pursuing a treasure hunt.  What if we wanted to construct a genealogical map for a particular person or community?  Published maps can literally be a treasure trove of information about a community's residents, and can provide a basis for sorting through relationships and movements. This talk will show how to index old map data onto geographic coordinates using Google My Maps, correlate residents with FamilySearch IDs, and incorporate other data of interest into a shareable visual format.  Several case studies of building custom Google Maps will be presented.

Presenter Joseph Jackson is an Autonomy Engineer by day and a genealogist by night!  He has always been interested in maps, statistics, and history, and frequently loses himself in explorations of old gazetteers and atlases.  His backstory includes several variations of studying people and places-- as examples, he is an Eagle Scout with Orienteering Merit Badge, he has a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from BYU, where his thesis focused on building maps from panoramic video sensors aboard small flying drones. He is a hiker, a Geocaching enthusiast, and a consumer of stories about local history.   In his professional life, he helps Unmanned Aerial Vehicles solve navigation and control problems.  In his home life, he lives in Wilmington, Massachusetts with his wife Jennifer, and their four boys.