Exploring Ancestry Family Tree Maps: Visualizing the Geographic Connections of Your Ancestors

Have you ever wanted to see an interactive map with all the people from your Ancestry tree? In this post, discover how you can do just that and discover where important events in their lives have taken place on an interactive map.

As someone who’s passionate about family tree research, I was initially searching for such features while planning my road trip through New England. With family connections everywhere that I go, this search became a top priority.

Of course I am not alone in forgetting where each and every one of the thousands of people in my family tree was born, married, or died – I recall some locations but not all.

Researching how I could do it proved fruitful; once I discovered that Ancestry mobile app provided an intuitive feature for viewing my family tree events on a map.

Family tree maps can be found on the Ancestry app for smartphones. In order to access important locations within your family tree, download and sign into this application on your smartphone device and sign in. Once in, accessing it should be smooth sailing!

If your family tree does not appear immediately, click the “tree” tab at the bottom of your screen – between “discover” and “search”. This should bring it up quickly.

Once viewing your tree, there should be two options visible on its right-hand side – your profile picture and an option with an icon representing a map – both of which allow you to quickly open up this interactive tool. By clicking either icon, a full map opens for you!

Now you should be able to see a map of the world showing all of the places where you have added locations of people in your family tree. Some locations will show two letters which represent initials of relatives who had events occur there.

Other locations will display numbers to represent how many ancestors had events at that location, which indicates their total count. When zoomed in on one, these pinpoints should either appear more widely spread out across that area, or when multiple relatives experienced events simultaneously in one specific place you can click the pin icon and view a list of all ancestors who experienced events there.

If there’s someone in your tree you want to learn more about, just click their name. I discovered (reminded myself of?) I have an ancestor from Jamaica I had forgotten about!

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