Map the Past

Map the Past is an application I've created, to be a hopefully very useful genealogical tool. A primary challenge of genealogy is to keep a subject being researched in the context of its time. It's easy to assume, especially in the 21st century, that our cities and counties and states have always been the way they are now. To put it in other words, it's easy to neglect or underestimate how much things have changed, 100 years ago, 200 years ago. The Mayflower landed at Plymouth over 400 years ago. The county you live in, and the places and counties and states/territories/colonies that your ancestors lived in have not existed forever. Counties were formed from unorganized territory. Counties were formed out of parts of previously existing counties. State legislatures made adjustments to boundaries over the years. It's important to account for what county a place fell within at a particular time. Map the Past helps to track this accurately. It shows how county boundaries developed, going back to the origin of the United States. It also contains historical information that helps to place your genealogic research within its proper context. Visualizing the map of the year being researched can help to show that wrong assumptions have been made, and can give clarity that leads to factual conclusions that might otherwise have been missed.

Click the link on the left menu, or this one for more on Map the Past. Download is available for the free version, which is limited in scope but fully functional. Send me an Email to purchase the full version.

My Books

Say, throw a starving writer a bone by checking out my books, for sale now in paperback and Kindle on Amazon. The Kindle versions are only $2.99 each. The paperbacks range from $9.99 to $14.99, depending on the number of pages (and printing cost). Tremendous bang for the buck. Click the links to the left or below to see if you might be interested in what interests me.

My Genealogy

The majority of documents here are stories of my ancestors. Presumably you're related to me if you're interested in that. But it can be quite entertaining, the tales of the roles they played in history, which I had no idea of before I got into genealogy. I imagine that further in the past, people better remembered the events that preceded them, but today we tend to only know what we're directly involved with. Note that while I call the genealogies stories, tales, yarns, adventures, they're not fictional. For documentary proof of ancestry, refer to the Pedigrees. Click on the nameplate of a person to find a linking document to their parents. If you find anything amiss, please email me. On that note, there is plenty more to learn about the events my ancestors experienced. Please do google any subject you find of interest. You might learn that I've gotten something wrong. You could easily find new information. I find that every time I look, I find something. If you do learn new info, let me know about it and we can curate these documents. As an at-the moment update, I've been away working on my Map the Past project for a few years, and I'm just now getting back into work on my own genealogy. I previously heavily leveraged Ancestry.com's ThruLines feature to identify far-flung ancestors in my tree. I've learned a few things since then, including how I could be misled into thinking I had successfully found a missing ancestor. Re-evaluating each such case is part of what I'll be working on, and updating the documentation of my ancestors on this site, which is the official record.