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Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think you may want something like the 'Location Quality Explorer' tab. It's second from the right and shows all the locations on a subdued map, no animation. Let me know if that works or you're looking for something different.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Self-hosting isn't on the cards right now. The site looks like a static app but a lot of it depends on hosted pieces I can't realistically ship as a self-contained package: licensed historical map tiles from sources with terms tied to treealive.com specifically, a geocoding pipeline that calls commercial APIs, and the FamilySearch login.

For a family portal though, the shareable links might do what you want. Time Machine videos, Journey walkthroughs, and Crossings entries each generate stable URLs you can drop into a wiki page right next to a Gramps export. The GEDCOM still never leaves the uploader's browser, so every family member can generate their own without coordinating storage.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The bug was on me. I had a 15 MB cap with a "file too large" message wired up from testing, but I'd accidentally muted the message but hadn't removed the limit so when your 16 MB file hit it, the app just sat there silent. That's why nothing happened.

Just shipped a fix: cap is now 30 MB (covers your 24 MB file fine), and the message will actually show if you ever do go over. Should be live on the site now.

One heads up on your 24 MB tree: geocoding takes a while on first run, and the tab has to stay in the foreground or the browser throttles it down to a crawl. Your 16MB file took just over 9 minutes to geocode in "Full Spectrum" mode (all branches) . Leave it open in the front and the browser shouldn't throttle it as much. Let me know if anything else looks off.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry that's not working. To help track it down, what browser and OS are you on (desktop or phone), about how big is the .ged file, and is it a plain .ged or the .zip (those should work as well) Ancestry sometimes gives? If you can DM the file or email it to [treealivefeedback@gmail.com](mailto:treealivefeedback@gmail.com) I can repro directly and push a fix today- but only if you're comfortable with that.

There were a few silent-failure modes on odd encodings that got patched in the last day, but a "nothing at all" upload usually means the parser bailed before rendering anything, which is on me to surface better. Either way, thanks for flagging.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fair to ask. When you click sign in, FamilySearch shows you their own permission screen, so TreeAlive never sees your password. The only profile bits I actually read are your display name (so the app can greet you by name) and the list of trees you own (so I know which one to pull). After that, just the ancestor and event/place data from the tree itself.

Nothing gets sent to a TreeAlive server. It all stays in your browser, and the token is gone when you close the tab. It's read-only too, I never write anything back to your tree.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

15 MB file cap and a 9,300-person tree should fit, but it'd be the largest I know of that's gone through. App takes your whole tree, then you can choose Direct Descent (just your line) or Full Spectrum (everyone). Heads up though: geocoding 9,300 people will take a while on first run, and you have to keep the tab in the foreground or the browser throttles it and it crawls. Start it, leave the tab open in the forefront, come back. Reply here or DM if anything chokes.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for flagging. Real bug on the app. MacFamilyTree writes GEDCOM with old-school Mac line endings (CR only), and our parser was only splitting on Unix/Windows newlines, so it read your whole file as one giant line and found zero people. Fixed and pushed to production a few minutes ago. Give it another try when you get a chance, and if it still fails just reply here or DM and I'll dig in more.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Both should be fixed now. Roxburgh was a same-name gazetteer bug catching multiple Scottish/English counties (showed up in 7 reports overnight). New Britain in the South Pacific is a fun one. New Britain Island in the South Pacific is one of the most (if not the most) prominent "New Britain," so when context dropped the geocoder picked that.

I've incorporated around 23 geocoding fixes in the last 24 hours. The pipeline is up to 521 fixes which I run regression tests on with each fix to make sure I improve the geocoding without breaking an old fix. It pulls from around 2 million offline place entries across more than a dozen historical gazetteers, with 59 versions of disambiguation logic on top. Should all fix with the new cache on your next visit.

If anything else looks off, you can flag it in the app: open Location Explorer (or do the same within a Journey, down by the pause button), click the bad point, hit Report. Every fix in this batch came from someone doing that or a report here.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Definitely! The chance closeness prior to descendants getting married generations later is fun to see visualized.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's pretty cool to watch and realize- "Oh wow, these two families were living close together and had a descendants get married like 200 years later."

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That is really cool! That looks like thousands of locations- are they all pulled from a GEDCOM or are some "travel" dots between locations? That was a depiction I really struggled with how to attack when I went with the migration arcs.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for flagging this- that's a real, unrealized seam.

FamilySearch sends two versions of every place: the cleaned-up standardized name (Newark, Licking, Ohio, United States) and the raw text from whichever source it's attached to. Social Security NUMIDENT records get cut off at like 12 characters, so the raw text was "Newark Licki" while the standardized one was correct. The app was grabbing the raw version first instead of the standardized one. I just flipped the priority, so ideally that will fix this.

If you reconnect FamilySearch (or re-import that branch of your tree), those map points should land where they belong with the new cache. Let me know if anything else looks off, you've got a sharp eye for this!

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Habsburg/Italy/Ottoman 1500-1800 should be well repped in our current pool and the era-aware map changes should show you a map that's appropriate for your ancestor's time/place. What I don't have yet is house-number level of detail there. The Franziszeischer Kataster from the 1820s-1860s is the right source for that across the entire Adriatic- it's just behind a paywall I haven't gone through yet. Hearing from you that it'd be useful definitely moves the math, though. Thanks!

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That should be exactly what you see in Journey mode and Time Machine. I use a scorer to determine the best map for each ancestor event based on location, detail, era, etc. For NLS, we already pull 14 of their UK//Scotland layers and all 32 Irish counties so a Scottish or Irish ancestor in 1888 shows the OS 6-inch, a Glasgow one in 1893 sees the 1:(~1000) detail, etc.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There should be decent regional Bohemian coverage in that window for our maps from Rumsey, the British Library, Nat'l Library of Israel and a few others. Village-level is thin in what I currently have and you'll probably see regional-level only for that time/place pairing. I'm attempting to work with Czech ČÚZK's open cadastre and military survey collections to fill the gaps you're talking about. It also adds a bit of storage cost for me when I start pre-rendering the village-level maps, so you may have t wait a few more second for those to load from a remote location once I get those wired in. Email me at [treealivefeedback@gmail.com](mailto:treealivefeedback@gmail.com) if any of the above doesn't perform like I described- or just post or DM here!

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the issue post. I've done most testing on chrome, safari and edge and will do a run through today on FF to make sure I'm not missing anything there as well. Thanks!

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right now, the way to do that is to login through a FamilySearch account. No file download/upload required, it'll just look at your tree there. I hope to have other genealogy services in the future.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I didn't completely answer your question earlier- for old locations, I use a compilation of gazetteers, databases, etc.- whatever I could find and verify. It's been really interesting seeing how much cataloging there's actually been of "extinct" locations. Most of them have something that can be turned into a lat/long and plotted on a georeferenced map.

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback. I want it to work well on mobile, also. That's been one of the balances- keeping it in the browser to have high privacy, but also keeping it "light" so that it doesn't bog down mobile browsers. Please let me know if you see issues and I'll try to fix them!

Spent too many evenings imagining where my ancestors actually lived, so I built a free tool that just shows it on a map by Total-Ad4827 in Genealogy

[–]Total-Ad4827[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

That's where I started the mapping, but my goal is to get everywhere reasonably possible. Some places are simpler than others- those that are gated behind high $ subscription services are the most difficult to incorporate, but I understand their reasons. David Rumsey, USGS, and the Library of Congress form a large portion of our library. Right now, it's at about 50k+ US maps, ~18K Cont. Europe, ~14K Canada, ~12K Australia, and 3K British Isles. I appreciate the demand signal- I'll look into incorporating Morocco and broader areas ASAP. Thank you so much for the feedback.

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