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ANCESTOR MAP

See Your Family's History
on the Map

AncestorOS geocodes place names from your family tree and pins them on an interactive map — births, deaths, marriages, and migrations. See where your family lived and how they moved.

Ancestor Map
34 locations
Layers
Births
Deaths
Marriages
Other
Migration
W. Kowalski
Poznań, Poland
W. Kowalski
Chicago, IL
E. & W. Kowalski
Chicago, IL
M. Sullivan
Cork, Ireland
Walter Kowalski
Poznań, Poland
Birth · 1921

Your tree's locations, automatically mapped

Wherever you've entered a birth place, death place, marriage location, or other event on any person's profile, that place appears on the Ancestor Map. AncestorOS geocodes every place name via OpenStreetMap — type a city, county, country, or any real place name and it resolves to coordinates automatically. No manual coordinate entry required.

Example place names that geocode
Cork, Ireland Birth
Chicago, Illinois Death
Poznań, Poland Birth
County Galway, Ireland Other

Five layer types, toggled independently

The map organizes your family's locations into five distinct layers — each with its own color and toggle. Birth locations appear as green pins, death locations as gray, marriages as purple, other events as navy, and optional migration lines as dashed colored paths. Turn any layer on or off from the sidebar to focus on what you're researching. All five layers can be displayed simultaneously.

Map Layer Types
Birth locations Green pins
Death locations Gray pins
Marriage locations Purple pins
Other events Navy pins
Migration lines Dashed paths

Migration lines show the journey

Enable migration lines to draw dashed paths between each person's birth location and death location. Across an entire family tree, this reveals the geographic movement of your family over generations — emigration routes, internal migrations, settlement patterns, and the distance between where each ancestor was born and where they died. It's one of the most telling views in genealogy research.

Ireland Illinois
Dashed lines connect birth and death
locations for each person in your tree

Three steps to mapping your family

The map builds itself from place names already in your tree. No extra data entry needed.

1

Add places to your family tree

Enter birth, death, marriage, or other event locations for people in your tree — in plain text, just like you'd write them normally. City and state, city and country, county, or any combination. AncestorOS handles the geocoding.

2

Open the Ancestor Map

AncestorOS automatically geocodes every place name it finds in your tree using OpenStreetMap via Nominatim. A progress bar shows geocoding status as pins appear. Results are cached locally so subsequent loads are instant.

3

Toggle layers and explore

Use the sidebar layer toggles to show or hide births, deaths, marriages, other events, and migration lines. Click any pin item in the sidebar list to focus the map on that location. Hover any map pin for a popup with the person's name, place, event type, and date.

Everything the map feature offers

A geographic view of your entire family history — no coordinates, no setup, no extra work.

Automatic geocoding

Just type a place name. AncestorOS resolves it to map coordinates via OpenStreetMap — no API key, no manual coordinate entry required.

Five map layers

Birth, death, marriage, other events, and migration lines — each independently toggled. Focus on the layer that matters for your current research.

Migration path lines

Dashed lines connecting birth and death locations reveal how your family moved across regions and continents over generations.

Clickable pins

Click any item in the sidebar pin list to focus the map on that location. Hover any map pin for a popup with the person's name, event type, date, and a View Person link.

Sortable sidebar list

The left sidebar shows a scrollable list of every pinned location with colored dots and event type badges — a quick way to scan and navigate all mapped places.

Cached results

Geocoded locations are cached locally after the first run. Subsequent map loads are fast — no repeated API calls for places already resolved.

Common questions

No. Just type place names the way you'd normally write them — "Cork, Ireland" or "Chicago, Illinois" or "County Mayo" — and AncestorOS geocodes them automatically. No coordinates, no special formatting required.
AncestorOS uses OpenStreetMap via Nominatim. It's a free, open geocoding service with worldwide coverage — including rural areas, historical place names, and smaller localities that commercial geocoders sometimes miss. No API key is required.
Migration lines are dashed colored lines drawn on the map between each person's birth location and death location. They show how far and in what direction your ancestors moved during their lifetime. Enable the Migration Lines layer toggle in the sidebar to display them. They are especially revealing for families that emigrated across countries or continents.
Yes. Hovering over a map pin shows a popup with the person's name, the place name, the event type (Birth, Death, Marriage, or Other), the date, and a View Person link. You can also click any item in the left sidebar pin list to have the map pan and zoom to that pin.

See your family's world on the map

Enter place names in your family tree and the Ancestor Map builds itself.