Last night we had a fine family zoom "talking story" about Thanksgivings past. We talked food, football, and hikes.... I was talking about my grandfather's last two residences when one of the Californians asked, "where are these places?" She had certainly heard of all of the places he had lived. I am afraid I fumbled.
I know roughly how to travel between them and how far it takes by car. I realize the limits of my geography as I think of high points and rivers, farming vs hardwoods vs bulldozed pinelands. What was she looking for? These are the things that keep me up at night.
Then I go to the technology that is easier for me to quantify what I know and and things I want to figure out. (Of course the person who asked the question was on the phone.) Here it is the morning after and I am trying to capture my thoughts for when I have time to get back to it. At the very least, it is time to get my genealogy out of my home's common areas and into the den. Unfortunately genealogy is not at the top of my priority list.
Genealogy software
Residences seem to be stored in a hierarchy intended to disambiguate similar names rather than postal or street address. These might be institution > neighborhood, City, County (hello google), State, County. In GRAMPS you can find all references to that place including say all people that were baptized or married in a given church.
In theory they also reflect how places change names over time. Sounds good doesn't it?
GRAMPS enables standardizing thru a web database,
geonames.org. Obvious things provided by this add-on include alternate languages (and spellings) and elimination of similar duplicates.
What maps are available from GRAMPS, Familysearch, reunion, others?
Mapping software
I have used google maps to show pins for an itenerary. How can we leverage it to show people or timeframes? Googlemaps street view might provide pictures. How to date and save these?
Other software like apple maps?
Other tasks on my mind
A family member has been scanning pictures and letters. Showed him how to upload into google photos and share with specified google users. (I should update this with links from our correspondence). This brings me back to how do I want to organize my media. How do I want to backup, share across my devices, share with others...? This adds a level of documentation in too: I want not only a digital transcription, but also a translation. This is driven in part by trying to figure out how to share the information from lines that have no children. That is another topic.
Researching...
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