One of the most popular kinds of maps when Platial first launched was what we called the "Autobiogeography," maps with which people simply told the stories of their lives. Genealogy mapping, in some way, is a branch of Autobiogeography. People paint pictures of who they are by showing who their ancestors are. What stock they come from, and on the best of genealogy maps, telling their ancestors stories.
Recording family stories has become more and more popular over the past decades, as it became easier and easier to record the stories on one's own and as anthropologists began to grasp the importance of documenting one's own personal folklore. The Smithsonian Institute has a fantastically helpful guide to recording oral histories, which has done a lot to promote the collection and preservation of these stories. On a more informal scale, Storycorps has been traveling across the US since 2003 with a mobile recording booth, helping people get together to record their personal stories. They don't restrict themselves only to family stories, but more often than not the interviews they collect are between two people reaching across the generational gap who are connected if not by genealogy directly, by some more metaphorical form of kinship.
Mountainmaverick said, about making his family map called Birthplaces, "Both my favorite and hardest part of making that map was talking to my parents and learning the geographical distribution of my family." I myself did an oral history project with my grandmother years ago, and I was blown away by the amount of things I didn't know about my family's past. Digging into one's genealogy connects you to the past in a way nothing else can.
Here are few genealogy maps you can find on Platial to help inspire you to think about your own. It would be especially exciting to embed audio recordings from an oral history project onto a map.
One nice map is Moeller Family History by Tingleyx5. He shows the evolution of his Illinois family by marking where his ancestors worked, lived and went to school. This map tells a story.
The map Family History by Badwolf shows the origins of the various branches of his family tree in Europe.
Gen6tex's Family History map shows the traces of his ancestors across North America.
Immigration to America is not a personal family history map, but a map where anyone can show where their ancestors came from and where they first settled.
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